• Scheme Name: CM-GROW (Chief Minister’s Grant for Research on Odisha’s Wildlife).
• Occasion: State-Level Wildlife Week Celebration-2026 (held at Lok Seva Bhawan, Bhubaneswar).
• Nodal Department: Department of Forest, Environment and Climate Change, Government of Odisha.

• Eastern Ghats: Documentaries focused on its rich, fragmented floral and faunal biodiversity.
• Bhitarkanika: Intertidal mangrove ecosystem, estuarine crocodile habitat, and coastal ecological buffer.
• Nandankanan Zoological Park: Upgraded visitor amenities and conservation breeding support infrastructure.

• Gap Addressed: Traditional wildlife governance often leans heavily on reactive enforcement (anti-poaching patrols) rather than predictive ecological modeling.
• Targeted Research: CM-GROW fills institutional funding gaps by incentivizing empirical field research on carrying capacity, genetic bottlenecks, wildlife corridors, and zoonotic interfaces.

• Direct Relief: Handing out ex-gratia compensation and reconstruction sanction orders to families whose houses were damaged by wild animals reinforces social safety nets.
• Building Social Capital: Rapid, transparent compensation reduces retaliatory killings (e.g.electrocution or poisoning of elephants/carnivores) and fosters local community buy-in for conservation.

• By developing structured ecotourism infrastructure (e.g.at Nandankanan), the state promotes nature-based livelihoods.
• Diverts tourism pressure from sensitive core zones to managed buffer areas, generating revenue that can be ploughed back into community development and local eco-development committees (EDCs).

• Eastern Ghats: Historically under-studied compared to the Western Ghats; scientific grants help address data deficiencies in these dry-deciduous and semi-evergreen biomes.
• Intertidal Bhitarkanika: Critical for understanding blue carbon sequestration, shoreline protection against cyclonic storms, and estuarine biodiversity resilience under climate change stress.

Wildlife research funding, human-wildlife conflict compensation, Bhitarkanika mangroves, the Eastern Ghats and ecotourism are recurring themes for OPSC Prelims (Environment & Ecology) and OPSC Mains GS Paper III, with CM-GROW a ready Odisha-specific example of evidence-based conservation.

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