Purnima Devi Barman: The Hargila Army’s Founder

Who she is, and the turning point

• Purnima Devi Barman was born in 1980 in Pub Majir Gaon, in Assam’s Kamrup region.
• She holds an MSc in Zoology from Gauhati University. She specialised in Ecology and Wildlife Biology.
• In 2007, she was doing PhD fieldwork in Kamrup district. She watched a tree with a Greater Adjutant Stork’s nest get cut down.
• Locally, the stork is called the Hargila. Many villagers saw it as an unwanted scavenger, not a bird worth protecting.

Pausing her PhD, and the result

• She paused her doctorate to found the Hargila Army. It is an all-women grassroots group that protects the stork.
• She organised stork-themed baby shower ceremonies. They mirror Assamese birth rituals. They built local pride around nesting storks.
• She encouraged women to weave Hargila motifs into traditional textiles. Conservation became a source of income, not just an ask.
• The Kamrup colony grew from 28 nests in 2007 to about 200 nests by 2019. It is the largest breeding colony of the species anywhere.

Awards and milestones

• 2017: She won the UK’s Whitley Award. She also won India’s Nari Shakti Puraskar, the highest civilian honour for women.
• 2019: She finished her long-delayed PhD. An artificial breeding platform for the storks also recorded a successful hatch that year.
• 2022: She received the UN Environment Programme’s Champions of the Earth award, in the Entrepreneurial Vision category.
• December 2023: The IUCN moved the Greater Adjutant Stork from Endangered to Near Threatened.
• 2024: She won the Whitley Gold Award, worth £100,000. It will expand the Hargila Army’s work beyond Assam.
• Today, the Hargila Army is a network of thousands of women across Assam.

Her method, and what is not fully safe yet

• Barman did not mainly rely on laws or fences around nesting trees. She changed the bird’s social meaning instead.
• Baby-shower rituals and hand-woven textiles made villagers protect the storks themselves.
• Do not confuse the IUCN change with full safety. Near Threatened is better than Endangered. It is still a conservation concern.
• Her 2007 turning point came mid-PhD, not before it. She finished the degree only in 2019, after over a decade of fieldwork.
• See Wildlife in India for the wider picture. See IUCN for the body behind the status change.

Three awarding bodies, kept straight

• India gave her the Nari Shakti Puraskar (2017).
• The UK gave her the Whitley Award (2017) and its Gold tier (2024).
• The UN Environment Programme gave her Champions of the Earth (2022).
• A statement question likes to mix up which body gave which award.