Wild Seve filed farmers' wildlife-damage claims for them

India's states already run mandatory ex-gratia compensation schemes for crop, livestock and injury losses when wildlife strays out of protected parks — real budgeted money, not charity. In 2012-13 alone, states paid out $5.3 million across 78,656 reported incidents. Around Karnataka's Bandipur and Nagarahole reserves, over 80% of households earn under $1,600 a year and literacy runs as low as 51%, and unpaid or delayed compensation was a documented trigger for retaliatory poisoning and electrocution of elephants, tigers and leopards.

The standard response to a compensation scheme that isn't stopping retaliation is to raise the payout or crack down harder on poaching — treating the shortfall as a money or enforcement problem. But a household survey Karanth's own team had already published found only 66-71% of affected families even reported their losses to the government at all: the money existed, but the claims process demanded documentation, land records and paperwork that illiterate rural claimants routinely couldn't complete alone.

Filed claims for farmers instead of raising payouts: field staff absorbed the paperwork, photo and GPS burden, so illiterate claimants could reach money already budgeted.

Farmers couldn't complete documentation, so they didn't claim.

Wild Seve's staff absorbed the paperwork burden, making claims feasible.

Claims were filed with the government, so existing funds reached farmers.

No policy change was needed, only labor, so implementation was quick.

When an incentive exists but isn't changing behavior, check if paperwork friction is a de facto denial; a free facilitation service may unlock it.

50 for human injury). The published evaluation is explicit about what the program didn't prove: retaliatory poisoning and electrocution of wildlife continued throughout the study period, and the authors could not show that improved payment access actually reduced it — only that it removed the access barrier. The program expanded from 2 wildlife reserves to more than 30 across India, and Karanth's team has used its claims data to push Indian conservation-policy researchers toward standardized, lower-friction compensation procedures nationally.