The Big Picture: By involving local communities as researchers, conservation becomes more cost-effective & creates jobs

When India conducted its most recent tiger population estimation, it earned a place in the Guinness World Records as the largest wildlife survey ever undertaken. The scale of the effort was staggering. Thousands of forest department staff and researchers walked more than 6 lakh kilometres, deployed over 32,000 camera traps, and surveyed an area larger than the total landmass of Germany. It was a triumph of logistics, political will, and scientific coordination, and it rightly made headlines across the world.

Almost simultaneously, far from the media glare and without fanfare, a much smaller but no less historic exercise was unfolding high in the Himalaya. In the cold, wind-swept landscapes around Kibber village in Himachal Pradesh’s Spiti valley, a group of local women were setting out camera traps to study one of the world’s most elusive animals — the snow leopard.

If the tiger is India’s most celebrated big cat, the snow leopard is its most mysterious cousin. Often described as a leopard, it is in fact the closest living relative of the tiger. Of the five big cats in the world, the snow leopard is the smallest, weighing around 35 to 45 kg. Yet it is immensely powerful, capable of bringing down prey several times its own size, including blue sheep and even young horses.

Snow leopards are specialists of the high mountains. Their range stretches across nearly 12 countries, from the Altai Mountains of Russia, through Mongolia, China, and Central Asia, and down to the Himalayas of India, Nepal, and Bhutan. Their population across this region is however declining. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) labels them as vulnerable in their Red List of threatened species. Snow leopards face pressures such as a declining habitat due to unplanned development, decreasing prey availability, direct illegal hunting and persecution due to their livestock predation behaviour.

If we cannot know how many snow leopards we have, we won’t know what we have to protect.

In India, they inhabit some of the highest and most remote landscapes on Earth, all of it above 3,000 metres. These are places of thin air, brutal winters, and limited infrastructure — regions that remain poorly studied and under-monitored.

Estimating snow leopard populations is therefore a formidable challenge. In India alone, they occupy over 1 lakh sq km — an area larger than Portugal.

Unlike tigers, which are largely restricted to protected areas, more than 80 per cent of snow leopards live outside national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, sharing space with pastoral communities who depend on livestock for survival.

The cats are solitary, shy, and incredibly secretive, moving mostly at dawn, dusk, or under cover of darkness. Even seasoned researchers can go years without seeing one in the wild.

The people of Kibber village have lived alongside snow leopards for generations. Livestock losses to predation have always been a part of life here, accepted as an unavoidable cost of living in the mountains. But over the past two decades, things began to change.

Women in Kibber with camera traps to document snow leopards living around their villages. Photo courtesy: Nature Conservation Foundation

In 2012, the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), a Mysuru-based non-profit organisation, initiated a handicrafts programme with the women of Kibber. The initiative was named Shen, the local word for snow leopard. Its purpose was simple but powerful: to help women generate supplementary income that could partially offset livestock losses caused by snow leopards.

The programme grew steadily. More than 100 women became part of Shen, producing high-quality, snow leopard-themed handicrafts that found markets in Indian cities. NCF invested heavily in building their skills as entrepreneurs. Many of the women travelled outside their region for the first time, visiting Delhi and Bengaluru to learn about design, quality control, and marketing. Through these products, a tangible link was forged between rural Himalayan women and the conservation of a globally endangered species.

After nearly a decade of running the programme successfully, the women were ready for something more. They did not want to be connected to the snow leopard only through motifs and stories. They wanted to engage with the animal in its wild landscape, to contribute directly to understanding and protecting it.

Kibber women fixing a camera trap at a suitable location. Photo courtesy: Nature Conservation Foundation

Led by conservationists Deepshikha Sharma and Deepti Bajaj of NCF, a small group of women decided to take the next step: deploying camera traps to document snow leopards living around their villages. They began modestly, with just 10 cameras. “At first, I wasn’t sure how it would work,” Deepshikha recalls. “The group was very diverse — some women were young, others quite old; some were educated, others had never been to school. I worried about how they would interact with each other in such demanding conditions.”

Those concerns quickly proved unfounded. The group’s diversity turned out to be its greatest strength. Younger women, familiar with basic technology, took quickly to handling camera traps and computers. Older women brought invaluable knowledge of the terrain — knowing where snow leopards were likely to move, which paths were safest, and how weather patterns changed across seasons. The presence of senior women also reassured families, making it easier for younger members to participate.

A snow leopard caught on camera being analysed in Kibber. Within months, women who had never touched a smartphone were confidently handling laptops and discussing capture-recapture data. Photo courtesy: Nature Conservation Foundation

Deepshikha and Deepti trained the women not only to deploy camera traps correctly, but also to retrieve data, identify individual snow leopards from their unique spot patterns, and analyse images on computers. For some participants, this was their first experience of using any digital device. Within months, women who had never touched a smartphone were confidently handling laptops and discussing capture-recapture data.

More importantly, something deeper began to take shape. A strong sense of camaraderie emerged. The women took pride in their work and ownership of the data they were collecting. They wanted to expand — cover more ground, deploy more cameras, and contribute more meaningfully to snow leopard research.

Over time, the initiative grew in scale and ambition. The number of camera traps increased, as did the area covered. Today, more than 30 women from three villages work together on snow leopard monitoring, forming one of the most remarkable examples of community-led wildlife research in India.

I have studied snow leopards in the state of Himachal Pradesh for the past 20 years. Looking back, I have seen the Shen project grow and morph and the women gain confidence every step of the way. Looking forward, I can see that one day the entire snow leopard population estimation effort in Himachal Pradesh, or even the entire Himalaya, could be led by a brigade of local women. The implications of this vision are profound. India’s National Tiger Conservation Authority has an annual budget of roughly Rs 300 crore for tiger conservation and monitoring. Tigers, as flagship species, inhabit reserves that cover about 2 per cent of the country’s land area. This model — expensive, centralised, and heavily staffed by professionals — has worked well for tigers.

But it is neither practical nor affordable to replicate such resource-intensive programmes for every species across the remaining 98 per cent of India’s landscape. Most wildlife lives outside protected areas, alongside people. Conservation in these spaces cannot succeed without local participation.

The women of Kibber are offering a powerful alternative model. By involving local communities — not as passive beneficiaries, but as trained researchers and decision-makers — conservation becomes more cost-effective, more inclusive, and more resilient. It builds trust, generates livelihoods, and creates a sense of shared stewardship over landscapes and species. Local communities can then directly benefit from the rise of tourism. After all, snow leopards are some of the hardest to see, and most sought-after species of big cats by wildlife enthusiasts and photographers.

At a time when global conservation increasingly recognises the importance of indigenous knowledge and community leadership, the work of these Himalayan women stands out as a quiet revolution. They are not just counting snow leopards. They are redefining who gets to do science, whose knowledge matters, and how conservation can truly work in a country as vast and diverse as India.

As India prepares to expand its conservation ambitions beyond a few iconic species, the lesson from Kibber is both timely and urgent. The future of wildlife conservation in a crowded, complex country cannot rest solely on expensive, centralised government programmes. It must be built on trust, capacity, and local-level leadership. Government agencies, funding bodies, and conservation policies need to formally recognise and invest in community-led monitoring, especially by women, as a legitimate and powerful pillar of national wildlife science.

Training, data ownership, and long-term institutional support must flow to those who live closest to the landscapes we seek to protect. If India can create space for the women of Kibber to lead the counting of snow leopards, it will not only secure the future of a ghost of the mountains, but also chart a more democratic, durable path for conservation across the country.

— The writer is director of the India Program of the Snow Leopard Trust