The Better India · 3 hours ago

How Andaman Ifs Officer Sandeep Behera Turned Bird Hunters Into Birdwatchers

When a forest officer in India's Andaman Islands noticed people hunting birds with air guns, he didn't reach first for penalties - he reached for curiosity about why. Sandeep Divyajyoti Behera understood that the reasons ran deep: food, tradition, belief - and that enforcement alone couldn't touch any of them. His response, the campaign "Gun Choro, Camera Pakado" ("Drop the Gun, Pick Up the Camera"), invited hunters into a different relationship with the birds around them, one built on discovery rather than dominance. A parallel effort, Mission 1 Lakh, sent teams to remote beaches where 1,19,000 kilograms of marine waste had quietly accumulated - waste that, when studied, bore labels from 19 to 20 countries, turning litter into evidence of a shared global problem. Together, the two initiatives point toward something Behera seemed to understand from the start: that lasting conservation needs communities to be part of the solution, not simply subjects of it.