Every other year, The Wildlife Institute of India, conducts a country wide entrance exam followed by an interview. Approximately 10-12 students are selected for the MSc in Wildlife Biology. Only six are provided fellowships by the government. It costs about Rs 2.5 lakhs for an unfunded student to pay for course fees at WII.

Over the years these MSc students have gone onto for higher studies at the Ph.D. level and joined conservation oriented NGOs or started their own institutions, besides contributing to awareness generation and public knowledge. Wildlife Biology or Conservation Biology is not a lucrative field, so it is sad and tragic that a country with so many conservation problems is not able to fund 10 students every two years! These students are the next generation of India's ecologists and informed and trained conservation biologists. These students have taken loans or drawn heavily from their family budgets to fund their studies, and have no hope of repaying in the immediate future since there are no jobs with fat salaries waiting for them. Investing in these students would a great service to conservation in India.

ASCI aims to collect a total of Rs 150,000 ($3500) for the same and we believe that this financial assistance will substantially reduce the burden of the students. For more information about the institute and the students, donors are encouraged to contact the following full time faculty members at the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, India.

Dr. Ravi Chellam (ravi@wii.gov.in)
Dr. Jagdish Krishnaswamy (jagdish@wii.gov.in)

Information about the students:

Smitha Badrinarayanan

I am a student doing my Post Graduation in Wildlife Science from the Wildlife Institute of India. I have always found biology very fascinating. The course I am doing now would form the foundation for work that I intend to do in the fields of ecology and conservation.

I have graduated from the Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, with Zoology major and Botany and Chemistry as subsidiary subjects. During my first year in college, I took part in the Colloquium for Science and Technology conducted by CUSAT, Cochin, and received the first prize. I also worked as a student educator in the School Health Education Programme funded by the UNICEF. In my second year of college, I did a summer research project with a fellowship offered by JNCASR, Bangalore, in the field of behaviour and this work was published in the Vol 76(4) of the journal Current Science. I took a year's break after my graduation. I worked for a couple of months in a project studying spiders in the Guindy National Park, Chennai. I was also a member of the Madras Naturalists' Society and the WWF and took part in various activities that they organized.

I have wanted to do this course in Wildlife Science ever since my first year of B.Sc. I am interested in both the basic and applied aspects of ecology and believe that both would contribute equally to conservation. Although I am very interested in research in ecology, I also feel the need to do some active work in the field of conservation. It is here that the scientific training that the MSc. Wildlife Science course provides in basic and applied ecology would help me decide the kind of work that I could do in the future. Some of my main interests right now are the ecology of insects, behaviour and conservation. I am likely to be looking at the effects of various types of land use change on the insect communities found in the Western Ghats for my Master's project.

Roopali Raghavan