A conversation with Ashish Reddy, IFS, Deputy Conservator of Forests, Kalaburagi, on trading Amazon and Google for the scrub forests of North Karnataka, why “brown” is not the same as degraded, and what a single reservoir can reveal about an entire ecosystem.
“A forest is not a collection of trees.”
Ashish Reddy’s career began about as far from a forest beat as it is possible to get. A B.Tech graduate of IIT Bombay, he spent nearly six years at two of the world’s biggest technology companies, Amazon and Google, on a track that promised the usual rewards: stock options, a comfortable climb, a predictable future.
In 2016 he left it all for the Indian Forest Service. In the decade since, he has served in some of Karnataka’s most contrasting landscapes: coastal Kundapur, industrial Bhadravati, the dry plateau of Bidar, and now Kalaburagi, where he oversees, among other things, the state’s first dedicated leopard conservation reserve, taking shape near Chittapur.
Rashmi M from Neo Science Hub sat down with him to talk about the pivot from Big Tech to the forest floor, what a systems-thinking background looks like when applied to a dryland sanctuary, and why he believes the next big conservation question is really a question about water.
You spent nearly six years at Amazon and Google, one of the most sought-after career tracks in the world. What made you walk away and join the Indian Forest Service?
There wasn’t really one dramatic moment. It was more of a gradual realisation that I wanted my work to have a more direct connection with the public good, and with something larger than an organisation or a particular technology. I was also an avid trekker, and I was drawn to a profession that offered opportunities to connect with nature and to travel to different places.
The Indian Forest Service offered exactly that. A forest officer has to think about biodiversity, water, climate, livelihoods, law enforcement, local communities and development, all at once. And unlike many professional problems, the consequences of decisions here can play out over decades. That long-term dimension appealed to me enormously.
Is there a skill from your engineering career, such as systems thinking, data analysis or process design, that you now use almost daily in a way you never expected?
I’m inclined to say all three. A forest is not a collection of trees. It is a system involving soil, water, vegetation, herbivores, predators, fire, climate and people. An intervention that looks beneficial from one perspective can sometimes create a problem somewhere else.
My background also makes me naturally ask: what is the evidence? What is the baseline? Where is the data? How do we measure whether an intervention actually worked? Where are the inefficiencies, and can we make the process better?
That combination of data, field observation, institutional process and human behaviour is something I use almost every day.
What technology has most changed how you do conservation work compared with a decade ago: GIS, satellite and remote sensing, camera traps, e-surveillance? Is there a tool you wish more forest divisions had?
It is a combination of GIS, remote sensing and camera trapping rather than any single technology. Satellite imagery lets us see landscape-level changes that would once have taken enormous effort to document on the ground. GIS lets us bring together forest boundaries, roads, water bodies, villages, wildlife records and other layers, and understand how they relate spatially.
Camera traps have been particularly transformative for wildlife management. They convert something anecdotal, like “there is a leopard here” or “wolves occur in this area”, into something that can be systematically investigated. The discovery of dholes in Chincholi is a good example: camera-trap work produced evidence of a species whose presence in this landscape had not been properly documented for decades.
What I’d like to see is better integration. A forest division should ideally have a common spatial platform where field observations, camera traps, fire alerts, satellite data, patrolling information and wildlife-conflict records all come together. The real shift we need is from collecting data to using it routinely for management decisions.
You have served in coastal Kundapur, industrial Bhadravati, dry Bidar and now Kalaburagi: four very different landscapes in under a decade. Is there one ecological principle that holds across all of them, or does every landscape demand that you start from zero?
The landscapes are very different, but one thing remains constant: the relationship between forests and surrounding communities. It differs from place to place, yet it is always central. At this moment, managing the expectations and needs of people who live at the forest fringe, and who depend on forests, is probably the most critical part of forest management.
In Kundapur’s coastal landscape and Bhadravati’s malenadu landscape, water is abundant, but the human pressures and ecological processes are different. In a dryland landscape such as Bidar or Kalaburagi, water becomes one of the fundamental determinants of everything else.
So I wouldn’t say we start from zero in every landscape. The fundamentals of ecology, evidence-based management and community engagement travel with you. What changes is how you apply them.
Chincholi Wildlife Sanctuary is South India’s first dryland sanctuary, built around the Chandrampalli reservoir on the Bhima river system. What makes managing a dryland ecosystem so different from the rainforest-centric models most people assume apply everywhere?
Drylands require a very different conservation mindset. In a rainforest, productivity and water availability generally aren’t the primary limiting factors. In a dryland, water availability, seasonality and habitat productivity are fundamental drivers of where wildlife lives.
Chincholi is particularly interesting because it isn’t simply “dry forest”. It contains dry deciduous and moist deciduous forest, scrub and grassland, along with Chandrampalli and other water bodies. That creates an ecosystem in which animals must respond very strongly to seasonal change.
A dryland also shouldn’t be judged by how green it looks during the monsoon. Brown is not necessarily degraded. Grasslands, open scrub and dry deciduous habitats can be extremely important for species such as blackbuck, wolf and hyena. The management objective isn’t to make a dry forest look like a rainforest. It’s to maintain the natural mosaic of habitats and seasonal water availability that supports the species actually adapted to that landscape.
The Chandrampalli reservoir is the sanctuary’s ecological anchor. Are you seeing long-term shifts in rainfall or the water table that are changing how the ecosystem behaves, and how do you plan for that?
Climate variability is something we must take seriously, but I’d be cautious about attributing every year-to-year variation to a long-term climate trend without a sufficiently long local dataset.
We currently rely on rainfall-station data and water-level and reservoir-level measurements, and we are in the process of establishing long-term groundwater monitoring stations. For now, our focus is on building climate resilience: protecting catchment areas, improving natural water retention, and making sure existing water sources stay functional through the dry season. Soil-moisture retention works are being planned at the landscape level, using mini- and micro-watershed data from KSRSAC, the Karnataka State Remote Sensing Applications Centre. That gives the ecosystem greater resilience regardless of exactly how rainfall patterns evolve.
The sanctuary is commonly credited with around 35 bird species. How many of those are genuine seasonal migrants, and has the figure been re-verified with modern survey methods?
The commonly cited figure is 35 species, but our own staff have documented more than 120 using GPS- and timestamp-tagged photographs. The reservoir and smaller water bodies turn out to be important seasonal bird habitats.
That said, I wouldn’t want to give a precise number of genuine seasonal migrants without a systematic, multi-season survey. A properly designed survey covering pre-monsoon, monsoon, post-monsoon and winter, with repeated transects, is being planned shortly.
Roughly 30 Lambani tandas live in and around the sanctuary, with a settlement almost every 12 kilometres. How do you balance strict protected-area law with communities whose relationship with this forest goes back generations?
The first principle is that conservation and communities cannot be treated as opposing objectives. Chincholi is unusual because the protected area was created within a landscape that already had a substantial human presence. The law provides the framework, but field-level conservation depends on trust.
We have to distinguish between activities that genuinely threaten ecological integrity and traditional or livelihood practices that can be managed without compromising conservation objectives. At the same time, protected-area status can’t simply be ignored because a practice has existed for a long time. The practical approach is dialogue: clearly communicating legal boundaries, reducing unnecessary dependence on the forest, creating alternative livelihoods where required, and involving local people in conservation.
In fact, local communities can become an important part of the protection system. Someone who knows the landscape intimately can often notice a change long before an external monitoring system does.
Sandalwood and red sanders, both found here, are among the most heavily poached trees in India. Beyond patrolling, how do they figure in your habitat-management plans?
As a wildlife sanctuary, our primary focus in afforestation and habitat improvement is on planting fruit-bearing forest species that increase food availability for wildlife and raise the habitat’s carrying capacity.
At the same time, we consciously preserve the existing open grassland patches rather than undertake indiscriminate afforestation. Those grasslands are crucial for ungulates, providing grazing ground and supporting the sanctuary’s overall ecological balance. Conserving valuable species like sandalwood and red sanders remains important, but our interventions are guided by the sanctuary’s broader ecological requirements, with the emphasis on maintaining the natural diversity of habitats rather than simply increasing tree cover.
Do Lambani residents still rely on specific medicinal plants from this forest, and has that traditional knowledge been formally documented before it risks disappearing with the next generation?
Yes, some local physicians in the Lambani tandas still rely on specific medicinal plants from the forest. This knowledge is often passed on orally, and once the younger generation stops using it, an enormous amount of ecological knowledge can disappear within a single generation.
As part of a statewide exercise, the Karnataka Biodiversity Board has documented the medicinal plants of Chincholi Sanctuary in the People’s Biodiversity Register.
Chincholi hosts an unusually complete dryland predator guild, with striped hyena, Indian wolf, golden jackal, Bengal fox and now newly documented dholes, in a surprisingly small area. How do these predators avoid competing each other into extinction?
Predators don’t necessarily compete simply because they share a landscape. They partition resources in several ways: prey size, habitat, time of activity, movement patterns and social behaviour.
The dhole finding is particularly interesting. Camera trapping documented its presence in this landscape, including in adjoining forests. Research suggests dholes occur at very low density here, recorded alongside jackals and foxes. That tells us something important: coexistence is possible, but it may depend on adequate prey and sufficiently connected habitat.
So the real conservation concern isn’t simply how many predators there are. It’s whether the landscape is large and healthy enough to support their ecological requirements. If prey populations decline or habitat becomes more fragmented, both competition and human–wildlife conflict can increase.
Walk us through how Karnataka’s first dedicated leopard conservation reserve, near Chittapur, came together, from the first camera-trap data to what still needs to happen before it is formally protected.
The proposal emerged from fairly straightforward conservation logic: start with evidence of ecological value, then ask whether that evidence justifies a dedicated conservation framework.
Camera-trap surveys in the Allur (B) forest landscape of Chittapur range had documented leopards along with other wildlife. A subsequent assessment identified an undisturbed forest patch, within a larger forested landscape, as having enough conservation value to be considered as a dedicated leopard conservation area.
After a scientific assessment of the habitat, delineation of boundaries, consultation with stakeholders, and a review of legal and administrative implications, a proposal was prepared to declare 2,877 acres as the Allur (B) Conservation Reserve. It has received approval from the State Board for Wildlife, and the area is expected to be notified as a Conservation Reserve through Gazette publication shortly.
When a wolf or hyena kills livestock belonging to a tanda family, what does the compensation process actually look like on the ground?
The first requirement is prompt field verification. Forest staff have to establish that the livestock was actually killed by wildlife, and document the incident on the e-Parihara application, capturing precise GPS coordinates and photographic evidence of the damage. That establishes proof of the incident. The application then automatically calculates the relief due under standardised government orders and generates the official memos, which reduces human discretion and error. Integrated SMS updates let applicants know where their case stands at each stage.
Moving the entire pipeline to a digital interface reduces paperwork and supports data-driven decisions. The department’s objective is quick verification, timely payment, prevention of repeat incidents and better livestock management. Compensation is not the entire conflict-management strategy.
If you had unlimited funding for one scientific study in these forests tomorrow, whether genetics, hydrology or a full species census, what would it be, and why does that question matter most to you?
If I had to identify one core question, it would be this: how does water availability shape the entire dryland ecosystem through the year? In Chincholi, water connects almost everything: vegetation productivity, herbivore distribution, predator movement, livestock interaction, and the relationship between the sanctuary and surrounding communities.
I would establish a long-term network of rainfall and groundwater monitoring, map seasonal surface-water availability, and use camera traps and biodiversity surveys to track wildlife movement, combined with vegetation and habitat data. The second layer would be genetic: understanding whether populations of wolf, dhole, leopard and other key fauna are connected to populations outside the sanctuary.
I’d choose this because Chincholi’s importance may extend well beyond its relatively small notified area. The recent documentation of dholes has already shown that wildlife moves between the sanctuary and adjoining forest landscapes. If we understand how water, habitat connectivity and wildlife populations interact, we can move from managing individual species to managing an entire dryland landscape scientifically.
