09/03/2016
Compassion Unlimited Plus Action - CUPA
Team CUPA & WRRC congratulates our founder and Hon. president Mrs. Suparna Baksi Ganguly who was awarded the Nari Shakti Puraskar by the the President of India H. E. Pranab Mukerjeee at the investiture ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan on March 8th, on the occasion of the International Women’s Day 2016.
Ms. Suparna Ganguly has toiled selflessly for the past 25 years in the service of abused & neglected animals, including captive elephants, has been chosen by the Government of India as the 2015 recipient of the prestigious Nari Shakti Puraskar for her "outstanding contribution to women’s empowerment”.
She has been the first to say " this award should’ve been presented to the team at WRRC & Compassion Unlimited Plus Action - CUPA and that she wouldn’t have been able to make a go of it alone, but unfortunately, it’s an individual award. . ."
Suparna is a true embodiment of what it means to be an empowered woman. While she does not work directly with women’s issues, animal welfare touches each and everyone of us, directly or indirectly. In most urban & rural households in India, women are generally (though not necessarily) the ones who nurture and take care of domestic and pet animals; and traditional ways of doing things, whether animal-centric or people-centric, often backed by ignorant policies of the State & Central governments, affect women’s health, women’s status & women’s lives across the board. It is at this nexus that her work takes place.
Many of us don’t quite know what she really does — animal welfare is such a broad & loose term.
Her breadth of engagement in matters related to animals is astounding:
From creating awareness among the local people through on-the-ground educational & fund-raising activities. . . .
to fighting acts of cruelty at every stage, like the overloaded bullock cart which she stopped in the middle of a busy Bangalore road, creating a traffic jam & insisting the driver be taken to the police station (all captured by a passing newspaper journalist) . . . . to attending the Sonepur Mela in Bihar to see for herself the buying & selling of large animals like camels & elephants, and the rigors of exhibitionism & cruelty they are put to. . . .
to collecting information about elephants through continuous touring of various states. . . .
to writing independent & collaborative reports on various animal welfare issues. . . .
to editing books. . . .
to giving lectures across the country. . . .
to walking the corridors of bureaucratic power, educating government officials & ministers, and relentlessly strategizing to bring change to animal welfare laws through discussions, negotiations and, as a last resort, through the courts & legal system. . .
the list is endless.
Not to forget her damn phone, she’s married to it— she never not takes a call. . . it could be an emergency call for a dog, a hit-and-run case, lying injured on a busy street . . . or it could be a call from the lawyer fighting a Supreme Court case about an animal welfare issue in which WRRC is one of the petitioners. Text: Eileen Weintraub