Deadline: 20-Jun-24
The Centre for Wildlife Studies is currently accepting applications for the Wild Incubator Tech Program.
The Wildlife Tech Incubator aims to foster India-specific innovations in wildlife conservation. This initiative will concentrate on three core areas: fostering innovation tailored to Indian ecosystems, providing a platform for the creation, testing, and scaling of effective conservation technologies, and building the necessary infrastructure to support and amplify homegrown solutions.
Through Wild Incubator Tech Program, they will be providing a small grant to NGOs working on innovative technologies focussed on addressing current wildlife science and conservation challenges. The broad technologies can be IOT, AI, Open Data, Satellite Imaging, GIS and Remote Sensing etc.
The focus area of tech solutions:
- Human-wildlife interactions
- Combat wildlife trade and illegal hunting
- Land use change and Mapping
- Conservation of Species (Endangered Species in Focus)
Why is it important?
- India’s wildlife conservation landscape is currently facing two significant issues.
- First, there is a lack of technology-driven solutions that are specifically tailored to the unique challenges of India’s diverse ecosystems. The country’s rich biodiversity, spanning from the dense forests of the Western Ghats, to the arid landscapes of the Thar Desert and mountain regions of Ladakh, presents a wide array of conservation challenges. These challenges require specialized technological interventions that are not just effective but also contextually relevant. Moreover, the multitude of challenges like wildlife poaching and trade, human-wildlife conflict, connectivity being severed and the growing intensity of forest fires need innovative and deployable technology solutions.
- Second and more important, there is a notable gap in the scalability of pilot projects. Numerous innovative ideas, hackathons and pilot projects in wildlife technology emerge, but they often struggle to progress beyond the initial stages. This lack of scalability limits their potential impact, leaving many promising technologies underutilized and unable to contribute significantly to conservation efforts.
- The Wildlife Incubator Tech is designed to address this gap of Indian innovation and the scalability of solutions. By focusing on the development of India-specific technological solutions, the incubator will foster innovations that are directly aligned with the unique conservation needs of India’s diverse habitats.
Funding Information
- The top five submissions will receive a grant award of ₹20,00,000 each for a period of one year (FY 2023-24).
- Each project will receive an additional ₹4,00,000/- (Rupees Four Lakhs) for equipment purchase.
Eligibility Criteria
- Must be a registered non-profit organization based in India.
- Must have 12A and 80G Registrations.
- The project cannot be an academic research project (for example master’s or doctoral research).
- Cannot be an individual research project.
- The solution should at least be in a prototype stage. Only ideas will not be considered.
- The organization should have capacity internally or through a partner to deploy the project.
- The solution should be scalable in terms of easy adoption by the intended audience.
- The solution should contribute to public good in terms of accessibility to other organizations to be able to adapt and use.
For more information, visit Centre for Wildlife Studies.