Every morning between April and June, Ranjitsinh Devkar, Assistant Professor of Zoology at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, would wake up to messages on his phone from his team of volunteers deployed on the banks of the Vishwamitri river – someone had spotted a pugmark of a porcupine, another had a photograph of a trail left behind by a crocodile’s tail, one had zoomed into a stork’s broad, triangular footmark, and so on.

Devkar and his team were undertaking a massive conservation exercise as part of the Vishwamitri Flood Mitigation Project, a Rs 1,200-crore project, of which dredging and desilting the river were the first steps.

Over the years, heavy sedimentation caused by dumping of debris and encroachment in the Vishwamitri river had decreased the river’s carrying capacit

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