Rom Whitaker,

Rom Whitaker, popularly known as the snake man of India, has been working with reptiles here since the 1960s Please use the links on the left to browse the projects that Rom is involved in. Rom with a cobra rescued from a farmer’s house at Agumbe. . His conservationist career began with the campaign for the preservation of Silent Valley (which became an icon of the conservation movement in India). He was then instrumental in banning the exploitative snake skin industry and set up a tribal cooperative for Irula tribal snake hunters. India's first reptile park, the Madras Snake Park and India's crocodile gene bank, the Madra For more than a decade, Janaki Lenin’s identity was that of a film-maker. She was trained to be an editor at the Film and Television Institute of Tamil Nadu, South India. After six weary years of editing advertising commercials and soap operas, she was looking for a change of direction. Getting involved with Romulus Whitaker opened up new avenues in wildlife film-making. Together they founded Draco Films and produced more than a dozen films for National Geographic Television. Janaki with members of the team at Namdapha National Park, one of the remotest spots in India. A decade later, Janaki finds herself forging a new identity as a book publisher and writer. Her focus, as publisher, is mainly on producing world-class field guides to the fauna of India and making them available in 15 Indian languages at subsidized prices. She has written on a wide range of wildlife and conservation subjects for national newspapers, wildlife and travel magazines. She facilitates a working group of primatologists which drafted a national Action Plan for nuisance primates. She is also drafting an action plan for the mitigation of human-elephant conflict in India in collaboration with Asian Nature Conservation Foundation, Bangalore. Janaki is currently working to enlarge the scope of this initiative to include other animals caught in conflict situations with humans. s Crocodile Bank were also started by him. Rom has traveled to several developing countries like Bangladesh, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and Indonesia as a wildlife management consultant for the United Nations. He has written books, scientific papers and popular articles, and produced and presented movies. He lives with his life partner, Janaki Lenin, on a farm south of the city of Chennai, India. He has established field stations in the Andaman Islands and the Western Ghats to foster research. The various organizations he set up - the Madras Snake Park, Madras Crocodile Bank and Agumbe Rainforest Research Station - have functioned as resources for conservation education.

A former filmmaker, Janaki Lenin, currently tries to make a living publishing books while spending more time doing what she loves best - writing. Although she helped Rom in his conservation efforts for more than a decade, she was not an active conservationist until she stumbled on human-wildlife conflict mitigation. She thinks she has finally found the hook she needed to enter the field! She is currently the Regional Chair of the IUCN/SSC Crocodile Specialist Group for South Asia and Iran.