Rita Banerji’s Saving the Wild – Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation is one of several documentaries produced by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust over the last year. The PSBT productions will be screened at the annual Open Frame festival in Delhi from September 13-30. Apart from screenings of PSBT titles, the festival includes workshops and lectures.
Banerji’s film follows the efforts of the Centre for Wild Life Rehabilitation and Conservation in Kaziranga in Assam. The public charitable trust works closely with the Forest Department in rescuing animals that are either orphaned or stuck in places where they shouldn’t be. The film opens with the rescue of a yowling baby elephant that is helped out of a ditch by CWRC staffers and the Forest Department. A more dramatic rescue follows, of a hapless tiger that has had the misfortune of straying into the habitat of humans with camera phones. It ends well for the tiger, but that is not always the case, Banerji points out. As animal habitats are being increasingly encroached upon by an expanding human population, many of the encounters with the beasts have tragic consequences.
In this excerpt from Saving the Wild, a baby rhino is rescued and cared for before being re-united with its mother. The sequence shows the attention that needs to be paid to rescued animals, as well as the dedication of the CWRC staffers who care for these frightened creatures.
Clip courtesy Public Service Broadcasting Trust.