For the first time in the award's history, an Indian conservationist has won the Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year. Wildlife scientist Krithi K. Karanth, chief executive officer of the Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS), was named the 2026 honoree at a ceremony in Mumbai on May 6, capping nearly three decades of work bridging the often-fraught gap between people and the wild animals they live beside.
The award is one of the most prestigious recognitions in global exploration, and Karanth's win arrives at a moment when conservation is increasingly defined less by fences than by negotiation. Her specialty has always been the unglamorous middle ground: the farmer whose crops are raided by elephants, the villager whose buffalo is taken by a leopard, the schoolteacher who has never been told why the tiger in the next forest matters. Solving conservation, she has argued for years, means solving the human side of it first.
The numbers behind the award are remarkable. Under Karanth's leadership, the Bengaluru-based Centre for Wildlife Studies has reached more than 7,000 villages across India, working with over 100,000 people on tools and strategies for navigating human-wildlife conflict. CWS has partnered with 10,000 farmers to adopt wildlife-friendly agricultural practices and trained 50,000 local stakeholders in over 100 wildlife reserves spread across eight Indian states. Karanth herself has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and mentored over 300 young scientists from countries including Chile, China, Indonesia and the United Kingdom.
Her best-known program may be the smallest in scope and the largest in heart. Wild Shaale, which translates to "Wild School" in Kannada, is a conservation education initiative built around art, storytelling and play. Since 2018 it has reached 72,000 children across 1,626 schools clustered near India's forest landscapes. The premise is direct: a child who grows up curious about a tiger rather than terrified of it becomes an adult more likely to protect the forest the tiger calls home. Multiplied across enough villages and enough generations, that quiet shift is its own form of protection.
"This recognition is a tribute to every farmer, child, teacher, ranger and scientist who has stood with us in the difficult, beautiful work of coexistence," Karanth said in remarks at the announcement, crediting the field teams who do the day-to-day work in remote landscapes far from headlines.
India is one of the most biologically rich countries on Earth, home to roughly three-quarters of the world's wild tigers, more than 30,000 wild Asian elephants, and a remarkable diversity of leopards, sloth bears, dhole, gaur and birdlife. It is also home to over 1.4 billion people. Those two facts make conservation in India exceptionally difficult and exceptionally instructive. The country has demonstrated that large carnivores can recover and thrive in landscapes shared with farms and villages, but only when local people see a stake in the outcome. Karanth's work has been a sustained argument for, and a working blueprint of, that proposition.
The Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year title carries with it not just prestige but a platform. Past honorees have used the award to scale their work internationally, and CWS has signaled it intends to do the same, expanding training programs, deepening partnerships with state forest departments, and pushing Wild Shaale into new languages and regions.
For a quieter, less-told strain of conservation — the kind that involves listening to a farmer about a broken fence and a missing goat as carefully as listening to a tiger's call at dawn — this is a moment of overdue recognition. Karanth has spent decades arguing that wildlife protection succeeds or fails at the village level. With her name now on one of conservation's most visible awards, that argument just got considerably louder.
