Padma Award 2024: Parbati Barua, India's First Female Mahout Honoured With Padma Shri
As India celebrates its 75th Republic Day, on January 26, the country has recognised the contributions of 132 citizens with Padma Awards for their contributions to various fields.
One of the 110 Padma Shri recipients of 2024 is Parbati Barua, an animal conservationist from Assam.
Who is Parbati Barua
Parbati, also known as Hasti Kanya holds the unique distinction of being India's first woman mahout.
Born in the erstwhile Gauripur royal family in Goalpara district, as the daughter of Prakritish Barua, Parbati developed an interest in elephants at a young age, thanks to her father, who had around 40 jumbos in his stable.
She is also the sister of Pratima Barua Pandey, a Padma Shri award-winning folk singer, and niece of filmmaker Pramathesh Barua.
Parbati caught her first elephant at 14
Those days it was common for elephants to be captured from the wild and Parbati caught her first jumbo at the age of just 14.
She caught this pachyderm in the Kachugaon forests in Kokrajhar district.
Over the years, Parbati became an expert in capturing and domesticating wild elephants. Her wealth of knowledge working with jumbos came in handy in reducing human-elephant conflicts, not only in Assam but in neighbouring West Bengal and Odisha too, where her service was requested to chase troublemakers entering agriculture fields back to forests.
Parbati Barua - Queen of Elephants? ?
Her work came to the limelight after the BBC created the documentary "Queen of the Elephants" based on her life, along with the companion book by Mark Shand.
Animal conservation and reducing conflicts?
Parbati is currently a member of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group of IUCN.
Now aged 70, Parbati is still active in animal conservation and continues to train mahouts in handling elephants and reducing human-wildlife conflicts.
She believes that it is important to break down the scientific basis of elephant-keeping practices for the mahouts.
"Mahouts know what they have to do but they do not always understand the scientific basis. So, it's important to enlighten them on the scientific basis of the elephant training protocol," Barua had said in 2023.
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