Scholarships that are helping to change the world
Part three: A symphony of research, education and conservation
In the third instalment of our series on Oxford graduates who are tackling some of the world’s biggest environmental challenges, we meet a master’s graduate who tells us about using research to teach communities how to avoid — and deal with — snake bites, the joy of spotting tigers in the wild, and how his time at Oxford changed his ambitions.
(Read Part one: Rebuilding Brazil’s environmental profile here and Part two: Mitigating climate-related hazards in Nepal here)
Allwin Jesudasan: ‘I chose nature and the environment as a way to serve others’
Allwin Jesudasan, an Allan & Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust Scholar, is a graduate of the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at Oxford. Here, he speaks about his recent work as Director of the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and Center for Herpetology in India and his belief that his purpose in life is to give to society by protecting the environment and nature.
Since 2003, I’ve been trying to understand and highlight the way humans and nature interact: the positives, such as the pollination services that nature provides, and the negatives, which I try to address. For example, as Director of the Madras Crocodile Bank and Center for Herpetology, I used to oversee our field science in Agumbe in Karnataka. This was a unique place with one of the best conservation projects in the whole world, where research, education and conservation came together at a single point so well.
We focused on king cobras, who had a habit of entering people’s homes. The team, led by Ajay Giri, would rescue these king cobras and would educate people, convincing them to release the king cobras right outside their houses. Why? Our research showed that king cobras are extremely unlikely to bite a human being but would eat other snakes — especially venomous snakes — that might harm the human population.
Snake bites are a global problem: anywhere between 81,000 to 138,000 people die every year, mostly from lower income groups, with half of them sole breadwinners for their families. It’s a significant problem, so the impact of such work is lifesaving.
We also had a huge education programme talking about how to avoid snake bites and the correct first treatment for bites. Usually, when somebody is bitten by a snake, they tend to waste time by doing a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing and, by the time they go to a hospital, sometimes it’s too late. We were able to convince my home state of Tamil Nadu to actually count the number of snake bites at the hospitals — a huge step forward because authentic data collection is a key problem.
I am on the panel of experts for community engagement and snake bites and I’m giving my feedback to the World Health Organization for a toolkit about how to prepare solutions for snake bites. We also train several NGOs (non-governmental organisations) all over India to carry out these programmes on snake bite avoidance and snake bite first aid, and this has been a kind of self-sustaining project.
I have to go back to my childhood to explain why this work perfectly fitted with my life goals. My father had a very tough childhood in a remote village and his father passed away at a young age. He struggled but became extremely successful, which he attributed to the help that he received from different people at different points in his life. So, my dad used to tell me that we were indebted to society and I had a privileged life because of the help that he had received from people. To pay back society, I chose nature and the environment as a way to serve others. Also, I’ve picked up skills that are transferable to other social causes as well. So, now, I want to use these skills not just in the environment space, but for other social causes.
As a child, I used to volunteer for a lot of nature-based activities and then I started professionally in 2003 when I joined Greenpeace. After that, I joined Wildlife Conservation Society’s field project and I spent three years in the Western Ghats, in Karnataka: the Bhadra Tiger Reserve, Bandipur Tiger Reserve and Nagarhole National Park. That was the best time of my life. My primary work was to set up camera traps all over the forest to estimate the tiger population there and walk in the forest to estimate herbivore densities.
Every day was an adventure — it was really, really fun. Almost every week I would spot a tiger in the wild, and, really, there’s nothing that beats walking in the forest and bumping into a free wild tiger.
I completed two master’s degrees — one at the Madras School of Economics, and, later, one at Oxford, where I read for the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management. While I was at Oxford, it was great to interact with students and faculty from all over the world, as well as with students from different disciplines through the college system. The exchanges with them opened up a lot of ideas for me.
I then joined the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust (MCBT) and Centre for Herpetology, first as Assistant Director. I was promoted to Joint Director and later became Director. MCBT is the largest reptile zoo in India, with field stations and other projects in its remit as well, such as the one I mentioned in Agumbe. While there, one of the things I accomplished was to resolve a lot of data collection issues by using a mobile technology called Open Data Kit to collect, send and store data. We piloted this and it was so successful that I was invited to speak at the Geo For Good user summit organised by Google in 2018 at Google’s offices in California.
The badge of Oxford has definitely helped me. It gives me a lot of confidence and it opens doors that are otherwise closed. My course director Paul Jepsen told us that the conservation space came to the fore some time around the 1970s and most of the people who started out in their career then will soon be retiring, and there will be a huge gap left in leadership roles. So, during my Oxford course, I made up my mind to prepare for leadership.
Before I joined Oxford I was more interested in research. So, in some sense, before I joined Oxford, my career decisions were always based on the past. Since Oxford, I’ve always been trying to predict what would happen five or ten years down the line and then start preparing myself for that. I think that has been the biggest contribution of Oxford to my life.
I would not have thought of doing the course at Oxford without the partial scholarship from the Allan & Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust. The scholarship reiterates my life goals because Allan and Nesta are such wonderful souls: they helped somebody like me, who they didn’t even know. I’m so grateful that this wonderful couple created their scholarships and I was able to benefit. I’m confident that I will be able to pass on the benefits that I have received because of them to the rest of the world.
Allwin has now moved from his role as Director at the MCBT/CFH to work on a new project — we look forward to hearing more on this soon.
