Using Tourism as a conservation tool: The making of Baavan
Baavan is a trust, set up to further the interest in wildlife, forests, and people. The emphasis has been on scientific research that can enhance understanding of India’s flora and fauna and on promoting wildlife conservation in association with the communities living in and around protected areas. The trust was named after a key tigress that lived in Panna National Park in the 1990s and early 2000s, so-called for the markings above her eyes that could be read as a ‘5′ and a ‘2’.
While Baavan—bagh aap aur van was specifically set up with the objectives of furthering the knowledge of the natural world and improving relationship with it, once you interact with communities whose support for conservation is some of the most crucial, one realizes that Baavan’s target involves covering all aspects of human development. These remote communities are especially crucial to the necessary extension of conservation beyond Protected Area boundaries but their livelihood status is often such that their survival and the long-term conservation of the forests and wildlife around them, may be at variance.
Baavan aims to enhance livelihood options, improve education and living standards in ways that allow individuals to develop and prosper within a conservation framework – to bring the conflict to a harmony where both prosper.
Baavan is the brainchild of Dr. Raghu Chundawat & Mrs. Joanna Van Gruisen, who run The Sarai at Toria with the passion for wildlife and conservation. Born in Madhya Pradesh, Dr. Raghu Chundawat is a conservation biologist whose main studies have been on snow leopards and tigers. His pioneering ten-year research on tigers took place in the Panna Tiger Reserve and has been immortalised in the BBC Natural World documentary, “Tigers of the Emerald Forest”.Joanna Van Gruisen is from the U.K. but she has lived in the sub-continent for over thirty years. She is a wildlife photographer, writer and conservationist.
Their aim is to manage the Sarai at Toria (at Panna Tiger Reserve) in an environmentally and socially responsible manner, providing comfort and indulgence while protecting the natural and the cultural environment.
TOFT was privileged to support their activities for the year 2021-23.
To know more of their detailed activities, read Here
