Saving India's One-Horned Rhino And Elephants Using Their Poop

The norm dictates that one’s retirement ushers them into a life of peace and solitude but it was perhaps a luxury never destined for Mahesh Bora. A mining engineer for Coal India, the 72-year-old is now at the forefront of the fight to save the one-horned rhino and the Asian elephant using an unlikely weapon- their excrement.

It all began when Mahesh read about the poop of the elephant being used to make paper in Rajasthan in an in-flight magazine while flying from Delhi to Guwahati after retiring in 2004. His daughter, Nisha, said that her father asked himself, “If someone can make eco-friendly elephant poo paper in Rajasthan where there are only about a hundred elephants why can we not make it in the Northeast where about eleven thousand elephants roam?” She continues by elaborating on another insight gained by her father,”will not handmade paper making from elephant poo and rhino poo as a livelihood option motivate people living on the periphery of these animals’ habitats to protect them as their source of earning?” It was this core thought that helped ferment ElRhino into reality.

He visited the facility in Rajasthan where the elephant poo paper was made and returned to Assam to give birth to his new venture. The company, which started with his wife’s kitchen blender now employs 50 people. “The diet of elephants is all vegetarian. So the excrement is essentially raw cellulose, the basic ingredient for making paper,” says Bora as he sources the rhino dung from the deposits made on the periphery in a state where rhinos are often seen plodding across village roads. When a rhino finds a good spot to relieve themselves, they return for at least 10 days leaving behind about 900 pounds of dung.

“Nobody believed that at his age he should be starting a venture,” said Nisha Bora who was swept off her feet when she saw the work her father had accomplished while visiting her hometown. Nisha, a Sociology Hons. Graduate from Delhi University, was a qualitative market research professional who had worked with a company called Quantum Market Research for 17 years. The visit to her father’s enterprise, however, made her realise her true calling.

Elrhino’s Consume to Conserve Model

The ElRhino factory was setup in December 2011 with operations starting in April 2012 as the father-daughter duo partner to take care of the enterprise. While Mahesh looks after production in Assam, Nisha handles the sales and marketing office in Mumbai. Speaking to Homegrown, she revealed that ElRhino’s clientele included banks, advertising agencies , a clothing brand, automobile accessories, exporters, and conferences on social causes. While the company is currently engaged in bulk B2B sales, Nisha informs us that they are preparing for a Diwali launch of their online store by late October, which will cater to individual orders.  The products offered range from Rs 300 to 1200 with a medium-sized notebook costing Rs 500. She has also turned her gaze on the the various socially conscious conferences, which are organised and in which ElRhino takes part where she seeks to enlighten the organisers in merits of using handmade rhino poop paper and saving trees.

“No amount of telling them to save the rhino is actually going to work, But nothing works better than economic dependence. If they get some livelihood from rhinos, they’ll always try to save it,” said Mahesh, something which has been achieved by ElRhino over the years.“I can see the acknowledgement of the animal in their livelihood. So for us that’s a great validation of what we’re doing,” Nisha told PRI in March, though she tells us that the shift in attitude among the larger local population was a long-term goal at a time when rhino poaching was still a lucrative business with increasing rates of poaching.

2015 has seen cases of brutal rhino poaching with specially trained dogs being bought in to prevent poaching. “Our more immediate job is to create an awareness among everyone who buys an ElRhino product or reads about ElRhino to wake up to the idea that this is a very endangered species locked away in one part of the country,” Nisha tells Homegrown as she points out how barring some 500 animals in Nepal and about 20-30 in Bengal, all of the world’s one-horned rhino population was located in the forests of Assam. The adoption of ElRhino products has certainly been a challenge as handmade paper often caters to a niche but lucrative market.

“We want our products to be special and exclusive,” Nisha has said in the past  as she has no intentions of competing with the leading paper makers of the country but aims to create an awareness with the consumer who knows where their money is being used. The Bora family has a long line of activists and conservationists who have advocated for the one-horned rhino, with Mahesh having done a Post Graduate Diploma on Ecology and Environment while he was working with Coal India. While the Boras have gone through a tough learning curve in understanding the demand for their product, we hope their unique philosophy bears the desired results for India’s forests and endangered animals while am adoption of the Bora’s business model, which seeks to tie people’s sustenance with sustainability of the environment, could help other socially conscious businesses create symbiotic enterprises.

 You Can Find Out More About ElRhino’s products from their Website or Facebook.

Research: Anisha Wilkinson