Vivek Menon

Vivek Menon is an Indian wildlife conservationist, author and photographer who founded the Wildlife Trust of India in 1998 and has spent more than three decades on species protection, wildlife rescue and the campaign to keep India's elephant corridors open.

Menon has been involved in founding five conservation organisations in India. He started the Wildlife Trust of India with a three-person team in a small room in south Delhi, on the premise that conservation in India needed an organisation that could act quickly in partnership with the forest departments rather than campaign from outside. It now employs about 150 people, among them conservation biologists, veterinarians, sociologists and lawyers, and runs more than 45 projects in 23 states.

The work he shaped falls into a few strands. Wild Aid provides short-term financial and technical help in emergencies. Wild Rescue runs rehabilitation facilities, including the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation near Kaziranga and India's first rehabilitation centre for Asiatic black bears in Arunachal Pradesh, along with mobile veterinary units and a national network of rehabilitators. A species recovery programme has worked on the wild buffalo, the eastern swamp deer reintroduced to Manas from Kaziranga, cheer pheasants in Himachal Pradesh and markhor in Jammu and Kashmir. Since 2003 the Trust has led the Bring Back Manas effort with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Bodoland Territorial Council and the Assam Forest Department, restoring a World Heritage site damaged during years of insurgency. His own long preoccupation has been the Asian elephant: with the Government of India the Trust has surveyed more than a hundred elephant corridors across eleven states, and he has advised the Kenya Wildlife Service and helped establish Myanmar's first elephant reserve.

He has served on the Project Elephant Steering Committee, the National Wildlife Action Plan Committee, the CITES advisory committee and the governing council of the Central Zoo Authority, on four state wildlife advisory boards, and as honorary wildlife warden of Delhi. He chairs the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Asian Elephant Specialist Group and became the first Asian to chair the Species Survival Commission itself. He has written or edited ten books, among them the field guide Indian Mammals, and received the Rufford Award for International Conservation in 2001 for his work on the Asian elephant, the Whitley Continuation Award in 2018 and the Clark R. Bavin award in 2019.[2][3]