Home Themes Celebrating Nature-Culture Relationships Fellowship – Year 4

Fellowship - Year 4

Taju Pujen

Taju Pujen is a community conservation practitioner with over four years of experience working at the intersection of conservation, culture, and Indigenous knowledge. He has been associated with the Morey Conservation Foundation for more than a year. A Green Hub Royal Enfield Responsible Tourism Fellow (2022-2023) and Coexistence Fellow (2023-2025), his work has focused on community waste management, documenting the folklore and indigenous rituals of the Adi Bokar tribe, and exploring how Indigenous communities have traditionally coexisted with nature through field research in high-altitude mountains and lakes. He is currently continuing this work through the Morey Conservation Fellowship, supporting community-led conservation initiatives while documenting Indigenous knowledge and cultural heritage.

Fellowship Report – Adi-Bokar Community’s Relationships with High-Altitude Mountains and Lakes in Monigong, Arunachal Pradesh

Mampi Hazarika

Mampi is an early-career conservation practitioner with a background in Forestry and an interest in nature–culture relationships, especially within the Northeast Indian landscape, where she sees a rich diversity of perspectives, stories, and lived conservation experiences that remain largely under-explored. She enjoys writing and uses it as one of her key storytelling mediums.

She previously worked in the Central Indian landscape on mitigating human–wildlife conflict through community engagement, which shaped her understanding of how people relate to their environments across different contexts.

Fellowship Report – Humans and The Xihu: Stories, Beliefs, and Livelihoods around the Ganges River Dolphin on a Disappearing Island and Beyond

Preety Boro

Preety Boro is a young conservationist and filmmaker, currently a Nature–Culture Fellow with WCS-India and Canopy Collective, working at the intersection of conservation storytelling and community engagement. She has previously worked with WWF-India as a Field Research Assistant, completed the GreenHub Fellowship (2024–2025) where she made two documentary films with ATREE on habitat restoration and community resilience, and contributed to cultural mapping near Manas National Park through an internship with The Midway Journey. She also completed a Media Fellowship with Aaranyak and is currently volunteering with Wings of Florican, supporting Bengal Florican conservation through education, outreach, and field documentation.

Fellowship Report – A Sacred Plant and Its People: Ritual and Indigenous Relationships with the Sijou Plant in the Bodo Community Near Manas National Park, Assam

Raagini Muddaiah

Raagini has spent the last few years working in the Kodagu landscape, largely studying amphibian communities in agroforests to understand their response to climate change. Her interests lie at the intersection of species distribution and management practices that are both environmentally sound and economically viable. She is passionate on encouraging people to notice and appreciate the indigenous species diversity around them.’

Fellowship Report – Negotiating loss and continuity: Native tree–human relationships in the Western Ghats of Kodagu, Karnataka

Credit: Photo – Dusty Foot Foundation (Cover)