Inlaks Ravi Sankaran Small Grantees 2024: Tanaya Rele and Farai Divan Patel

Anasuya Borah, Tanaya Rele, Farai Divan Patel and Hitesh Kumar are
the 2024 Inlaks Ravi Sankaran Small Grantees.

Last week, we featured Anasuya and Hitesh. This week, meet Farai and Tanaya. Farai is interested in shining a light on the understudied and threatened laterite plateau ecosystems of Goa, while Tanaya is working to enhance conservation education in the country.

Read on to know more.

Tanaya Rele

While pursuing her Masters in Wildlife Conservation Action from the Institute of Environment Education and Research, Bharati Vidyapeeth University, Tanaya developed a keen interest in interdisciplinary research and exploring people’s perceptions towards local biodiversity. She believes that human-nature relationships are intricately woven, interdependent, and built on personal experiences with nature right from our childhood which we often fail to acknowledge as we grow older. This belief drove her to deepen her understanding of nature connectedness and how humans perceive nature, especially in urban and peri-urban spaces.

Following this, she was eager to explore the role of nature education in fostering and strengthening human-nature relationships. After her Masters, she joined Nature Classrooms, an initiative of the Education and Public Engagement Programme at the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), where under the guidance of Vena Kapoor and with the support of the team, she is designing the Nature Education Assessment Framework (NEAF). NEAF aims to visualize the effectiveness of our education interventions and identify areas for improvement while exploring the conceptual learnings and attitudinal changes among teachers and students through both quantitative and qualitative measures, thus providing a holistic assessment.

Though this framework will be created and trialed with school teachers and students, their immediate focus groups at Nature Classrooms, this tool can also be used for community-based education interventions. This flexibility of being adaptable in different geographies will ensure that NEAF can cover a wide range of nature education initiatives and help us understand how individuals perceive nature and their awareness of efficacy, identity, and inclusion with the environment. Through NEAF, the goal is to provide tried and tested tools for facilitators to help them monitor, improve, and engage deeper with human-nature relationships which is fundamental to long-lasting conservation action.

Farai Divan Patel

Farai Divan Patel is an ecologist and conservationist based in Goa. He has a Master’s in Wildlife Biology and Conservation from the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore and a BSc in Biology from the University of Bristol, UK. Over the last few years, he has been involved in research and conservation projects in the Lakshadweep islands and on the coral reefs along India’s West Coast. He has also been closely associated with the Amche Mollem citizens’ campaign, both as a researcher and campaigner. The campaign was started in Goa to resist three mega-infrastructure projects inside Goa’s largest protected area, and brought together the skills and talents of a large number of concerned citizens, including ecologists, artists and anthropologists. Through these experiences, he has realised the immense importance of interdisciplinarity, particularly combining social and natural science, in tackling conservation challenges.

Farai’s project centres on the highly understudied and threatened laterite plateau ecosystems of Goa. These areas are considered ‘wastelands’ due to their rocky, generally treeless characteristics. For this reason, they have become victims of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation across the state. They are, however, extremely important ecosystems and support a huge variety of biodiversity, including many species of birds, amphibians and endemic plants. They are also steeped in a rich, but disappearing, cultural heritage that includes interactions through foraging, grazing livestock and religion. Through this project, he aims to create a foundation for the conservation of the plateaus by documenting their ecological and socio-cultural importance. He also hopes to share the sense of wonder he feels for these ecosystems as widely as possible and foster a renewed sense of interest and ownership in them.