Agasthya 4.2

For many of us passion to be in the field and experiencing the wilderness is what has driven us to work towards conserving these places. This passion spans across gender, education or the job you do and there are few courses that will accommodate across all background to give an exposure to real time conservation. The conservation science course was meant to fill this lacuna.

The first course called "Conservation Biology Course" was held at Bangalore in 2001. Since then we have had 6 such courses, several of them in exotic places like Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and North Bengal apart from Bangalore. Similarly field projects were held in Biligiri Rangaswamy WLS, Mahananda WLS, Sessa Orchid Sanctuary and now in KMTR. In all these courses, the one thing that excited the students most were the field projects following the lectures and discussions in class rooms. It was really exciting to see the diversity of projects the students came up with. But the important thing the course stresses on is to have an open mind and the need to have a scientific thinking that needs to blend well with social and economic interpretations of a problem.

Since conservation is everyone's concern, we were interested to have anybody with that passion to join the course and learn more by doing rather than by merely listening to the learned. It naturally attracted a variety of young people, many of whom have gone on to pursue carriers in conservation and their projects published as papers. After a lapse of few years the course has begun again with the current one soon to be followed by one in the North East early next year. Subsequent courses may be completely field based. So do keep tracking the course through its website.

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