Bibhab Talukdar

Bibhab Kumar Talukdar is a conservation biologist from Assam whose working life has been spent on the one-horned rhinoceros and the grassland habitats of the Brahmaputra floodplains. He started young: while sitting his BSc examinations in 1989 he founded Aaranyak as a nature club to get students in Assam interested in birdwatching. Assam was then in the middle of prolonged political violence, and the club was one of the few constructive civic ventures of the period. It grew into what is now the largest non-governmental biodiversity research and conservation body in north-east India, staffed by wildlife biologists and field conservationists; Talukdar serves as its secretary general and executive director.

His conservation work has run along two tracks: field science and law enforcement. From 1998 he began organising legal orientation workshops for forest officials so that rhino poaching cases would be prosecuted properly, and he later extended these to the Assam police, the Sashastra Seema Bal and the Border Security Force. He has also worked on the transboundary dimension of rhino protection with Nepal, and on the critically endangered Javan and Sumatran rhinos with Indonesian agencies. He has published more than sixty scientific papers, contributed to two papers in Science, and worked on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment for the Eastern Himalayas between 2002 and 2004.

He has held a number of public and international positions: chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Asian Rhino Specialist Group since 2007, member of the Standing Committee of India's National Board for Wildlife from 2007 to 2010, member of the Project Elephant steering committee from 2010 to 2012, and member of the committee that drew up the National Wildlife Action Plan for 2017–2031. He sits on the Assam State Biodiversity Board. He was made an Ashoka Fellow in 2007, received the IUCN Species Survival Commission Chair's Citation Award in 2008 and the Harry Messel Award for Conservation Leadership, and in June 2025 was appointed Professor of Practice by Girijananda Chowdhury University.[2]