IWN Report — Tuesday, 15 September 2026
Wildlife SOS says its three-decade programme to move India’s Kalandar community away from the “dancing bear” trade has now reached more than 25,000 families. The charity marked the milestone this week with a new corporate award, its second national recognition for the same work since August.
The Wildlife SOS received the Impact Enabler Award this month at the Bosch Social Engagement Thank-A-Thon 2026, organised by Bosch India Foundation, recognising a partnership that has sent Bosch staff to volunteer at the charity’s Bannerghatta Bear Rescue Centre in Bengaluru, Karnataka. In August, Wildlife SOS had already picked up the FKCCI Global CSR & Sustainability Award 2026, in the Excellence in Women Empowerment, Diversity and Inclusion category, presented by the Federation of Karnataka Chambers of Commerce and Industry alongside the UN Global Compact Network India. The charity was chosen for that award from 127 entries.
The Turnaround
The Kalandar community is a nomadic group whose traditional livelihood, going back generations, involved capturing sloth bear cubs and training them to “dance” for money on Indian streets. Wildlife SOS co-founders Kartick Satyanarayan and Geeta Seshamani began investigating the practice in 1995, eventually visiting some 68 Kalandar villages to understand why the trade persisted despite being illegal.
India first outlawed the capture and use of sloth bears in 1972, but enforcement stayed patchy for decades, and a complete prohibition only took hold in 1998. It took another eleven years of rescue work and negotiation with Kalandar families before Wildlife SOS took in the country’s last known dancing bear, a male named Raju, in 2009.
The charity has since trained more than 5,000 Kalandar women to make handcrafted goods for sale, work it credits with giving the women financial independence for the first time. Over 17,000 Kalandar children have gained access to schooling through tuition centres the charity runs for the community.
Sloth bears remain a protected species under India’s wildlife laws. Rakhee Sharma, Wildlife SOS’s Senior Project Manager for Community Initiatives and Outreach, put the shift down to years of trust-building rather than any single intervention, and credited the charity’s field teams and the Kalandar women themselves. Co-founder Geeta Seshamani made a similar point, crediting the women’s own persistence for carrying it through.
The charity’s most recent addition to that effort is a library for Kalandar children, opened earlier this year alongside its existing tuition centres for the community.
Sources: Wildlife SOS · Wildlife SOS — Dancing Bear Project