'Interact With Nature To Experience It': This Is India's First Diving Grant Offering To Explore Marine Life

Founded by Vidhi Bubna, a non-profit organisation, Coral Warriors is India's first-ever diving grant that sponsors Indian citizens to understand climate change and its impact on the ecosystem of marine life through deep-sea diving. This organisation is offering interaction with nature in a unique way.

Founder Vidhi Bubna's first-own diving experience turned out to be heartbreaking. She expected a lot of coloured corals in the deep-sea as she had seen on Nat Geo and adventure channels, but she came across all white corals, which were dead from being bleached. This is a critical concern in the marine life that is prevalent due to climate change.

Deeply inspired by her deep-sea diving experiences, Vidhi saw herself form an emotional relationship with marine life and swore to work towards conservation, especially coral conservation, a conservation area with limited focus and efforts. She started Coral Warriors aged 23 to conserve marine life and increase youth involvement in climate change initiatives.

'To Believe In Climate Change, One Must See It'

She believes diving is not just a thrilling, adrenaline-rushed activity but an essential tool for understanding climate change. The organisation mainly focuses on supporting youth passionate about climate change who want to make a difference.

The dive grant sponsors deserving candidates' airfare, food, stay, flights and level 1 of the scuba diving course. In the US, UK and Australia, various similar grants offer the diving experience for a cause, but this is the first of its kind grant focusing on an Indian citizen.

Founder Vidhi Bubna, while talking to The Logical Indian about the importance of this initiative, said, "This initiative is important for society, specifically in India, because sports like diving are not encouraged by parents. Moreover, specifically for women in India, there is strong discouragement to pursuing adventure sports like scuba diving. Our diving grant creates opportunities for women to break gender stereotypes and learn diving."

Also, as mentioned above, scuba diving is a great tool to understand climate change better. With scuba diving, we are also creating the opportunity for youth to learn diving so they can understand climate change more deeply, she added.

How This Idea Came To Existence?

She is also one of India's youngest master scuba divers. While learning to scuba dive in Andamans, she realised the ocean was without any fish on her first ever dive, and all the corals had turned white. This made her feel shocked and guilty because she knew human activity contributes to climate change daily.

She said, "I had never before imagined that the little things we do on land have consequences on oceanic life, one that we cannot even see. I realised that if I had such a deep emotional reaction after diving, which led me to cry for days, other people could have similar reactions too." Hence, I realised scuba diving is a powerful tool to understand climate change better, she added. With this thought, Coral Warriors, India's first ever diving grant sponsoring Indian citizens, especially women to learn diving, was started.

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