Mihika Sen

Mihika is an ecologist who grew up in Assam, where she saw first-hand how shrinking habitats were bringing people and elephants closer together, often with harmful results. In Udalguri district, habitat loss and fragmentation have pushed elephants into farmlands, tea estates and even people's homes. The district is home to many communities, including Bodos, Adivasi tea tribes and Nepalis, who use a wide range of methods to keep elephants away. These methods often stop working, because individual elephants quickly adapt to them in different ways.

Through her Champions project, Mihika is identifying individual elephants in Udalguri in the north-east and Gudalur in the south to build the landscape's first systematic database of individual elephants. The database will hold physical and behavioural profiles, support population estimates and help identify elephants that habitually raid crops. Alongside this, the team is documenting how local communities experience life with elephants and the coexistence strategies they already use. Combining scientific and local knowledge, the project will produce a crop protection manual tailored to individual elephant behaviour. It will also produce films on the coexistence challenges specific to Udalguri and Gudalur, and a storybook that builds empathy for individual elephants among children and the wider public. For Mihika, coexistence is a continuous process of people and elephants adapting to one another, and her work aims to make that process more targeted, adaptable and sustainable for both.