Four Indian students develop wildlife protection plan using maths, win global award

Students from India STEM Society won a Meritorious Award at the 2026 International Mathematical Modelling Challenge for their Etosha wildlife model. Their work showed how mathematics can guide conservation choices when resources are limited.

In Short

• The challenge used Etosha National Park as a wildlife conservation case study
• Students mapped rangers, drones, cameras and satellites where surveillance stayed limited
• Their model assessed poaching, wildfires and human-wildlife conflict across ecological priorities

Four Indian students from Pune and Mumbai have won a Meritorious Award at the 2026 International Mathematical Modelling Challenge, taking their classroom mathematics to an unusual problem: how to protect wildlife in a huge national park with limited resources.

The team: Tanish Rajesh Kulkarni, Anshveer Bindra, Nipun Saha and Vedansh Saha, represented India STEM Society at the international challenge. They were among 68 finalist teams from 37 countries and regions.

WHEN MATHS MEETS WILDLIFE

This year’s challenge asked students to tackle “Protecting Wildlife at Scale”, using Namibia’s Etosha National Park as a case study.

Instead of simply solving equations, teams had to build mathematical models that could help decide how limited conservation resources should be used.

The team divided the park into smaller areas and looked at factors such as wildlife importance, waterholes, habitat connectivity and the risk of threats such as poaching, fires and human-wildlife conflict.

The Indian team focused on how rangers, drones, camera traps and satellite coverage could be allocated to protect the park more effectively. Their presentation describes the problem as one of deciding where these resources should go when full surveillance of a huge wildlife reserve is not possible.

MEET THE TEAM

Tanish Rajesh Kulkarni, a Grade 11 student at Bharati Vidyapeeth Rabindranath Tagore School of Excellence in Pune, was part of the four-member team.

Anshveer Bindra, a Grade 12 student at Oberoi International School, JVLR, Mumbai, joined him.

The team also included Mumbai-based brothers Nipun Saha, a Grade 11 student, and Vedansh Saha, a Grade 12 student, both from Dhirubhai Ambani International School.

The students were guided by Dr Sagar Shrivastava, a postdoctoral researcher at Iowa State University.

WHEN MATHS LEAVES THE CLASSROOM

Their model suggested a targeted way of using limited resources rather than trying to monitor every part of the park equally.

The team’s presentation notes that Etosha covers about 22,935 square kilometres and is home to endangered black rhinos and more than 114 mammal species. At the same time, the park has limited resources, including 295 staff, an 850-kilometre fence and 3,551 kilometres of roads.

The students therefore built an optimisation model around three major threats: poaching, wildfires and human-wildlife conflict. Their approach also considered ecological importance, including species priority, proximity to waterholes and habitat connectivity.

The proposed deployment included 104 rangers, 211 drones, 468 camera traps and satellite coverage. It covered 857 of the park’s 990 modelled cells, with 92.3 per cent of ecological importance covered.

The team’s model also showed a 40.3 per cent reduction in discounted conservation loss compared with no intervention.

INDIA ON THE GLOBAL STAGE

The International Mathematical Modelling Challenge is an international competition for secondary school students that tests how teams apply mathematics to authentic, real-world problems.

The 2026 competition brought together finalist teams from across the world, with the international round taking place over a five-day period between February and April.

The Indian team’s Meritorious Award places it among the recognised teams from this year’s competition. The award-winning teams were invited to the 2026 International Summit and Awards Ceremony in Boston, held from August 5 to 9.

For the four students, the achievement shows what mathematical modelling can look like beyond equations and examinations: taking a messy real-world problem, breaking it down and using numbers to find a workable solution.

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