Couple Buys 300 Acres Of Barren Land, Converts It Into India's First Private Wildlife Sanctuary

A couple has transformed 300 acres of denuded farmland in Karnataka into what is probably India's first private wildlife sanctuary. Pamela Malhotra walks through the forest, pointing out a spot where she and her husband saw a herd of 10 elephants a few days ago. She also shows off a giant tree nearby.

"That tree is about 700 years old and draws different types of birds," she says, running her hand along the massive trunk

Pamela and her husband Anil K Malhotra have spent the last 25 years buying denuded and abandoned agricultural land in Karnataka's Kodagu district and reforesting it, to return the land to a bio-diverse rainforest for elephants, tigers, leopards, deer, snakes, birds and hundreds of other creatures.

The couple owns 300 acres of land in Brahmagiri, a mountain range in the Western Ghats, which houses the Malhotras' Save Animals Initiative (SAI) Sanctuary. It's probably the only private wildlife sanctuary in the country with more than 300 kinds of birds as well as many rare and threatened animal species.

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But this was not the scene in 1991 when Anil, 75, and Pamela, 64, who run the SAI Sanctuary Trust, came to this part of the country. "When I came here with a friend who suggested I buy this land, it was a wasteland of 55 acres. The owner wanted to sell because he couldn't grow coffee or anything else here," says Anil, an alumnus of Doon School, who worked in the real estate and restaurant business in the US before moving to India. "For me and Pamela, this was what we were looking for all our life."

They had almost given up the search for land after hitting the land ceiling hurdle in north India

The couple, who met and married in New Jersey, US, in the 1960s, had a love for nature from their childhood. When they went on their honeymoon to Hawaii, they fell in love with its beauty and decided to settle there. "That is where we learnt the value of forests and realized that despite threats of global warming no serious efforts were being made to save forests for the future," says Anil.

When the Malhotras came to India for the funeral of Anil's father in 1986, the pollution in Haridwar horrified them. "There was so much deforestation, the timber lobby was in charge, and the river was polluted. And no one seemed to care. That was when we decided to do something to reclaim the forests in India," says Anil, sitting below a dense canopy in front of their house facing the Brahmagiri hills.

Taxonomy

• Water
• Environment