Anant Ambani. (Beth Clifton collage)
Nobody knows quite what to make of the state-of-the-art facility begun by Anant Ambani, 29, but it has taken in thousands of animals from often dire situations
JAMNAGAR, India––A global chorus of conservationists are currently bashing Anant Ambani, 29, son of the reputed twelfth richest man in the world, for allegedly building the world’s biggest private zoo, but reality is that the “zoo” is not a zoo at all, not yet, anyway, and most of the flak fired at Anant Ambani appears to be because it is not.
Rather, the 3,000-acre facility, named Vantara, meaning “Star of the Forest” in Hindi, is currently a nonprofit sanctuary, as sanctuaries are defined by the American Sanctuary Association, Association of Sanctuaries, and Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries.
The original Vantara, in western Gujarat, is reportedly soon to be matched by another now in development on the far eastern side of India, in Kaziranga region of Assam.
Anant Ambani, currently & younger. (Beth Clifton collage)
Not open to the public––yet
The newly completed first Vantara is not now open to the public, although Anant Ambani has pledged that it soon will be, apparently under restrictions similar to those of other sanctuaries.
Vantara is also not engaged in selling or transferring animals on “conservation loans,” and has not observed zoo protocols for animal acquisition, the most frequent cause of criticism, precisely because it is not acquiring animals for captive breeding and/or paid exhibition.
Rather, Vantara is acquiring animals, a great many animals, to save their lives. Many of those animals came from the wild, captured for cause, such as rogue elephants, or by poachers and traffickers, but are not candidates for return to the wild, again for demonstrating dangerous behavior, or because where they came from is unknown, or often because while in captivity they have become habituated to humans and dependent upon humans for sustenance.
Captive breeding? “Only for return to the wild,” says Anant Ambani
Some captive breeding of endangered species is ahead at Vantara, Anant Ambani says, but only when suitable habitat is available for releasing the animals into the wild, not to replenish captive populations, as in zoo-managed “Species Survival Programs.”
Anant Ambani is not a zookeeper, and never was.
“The youngest Ambani son has long liked wildlife,” reported vociferous Vantara critic M. Rajshekhar, on March 20, 2024 for the Washington D.C.-based Pulitzer Center, in “The Costs of Reliance’s Wildlife Ambitions.”
Anant Ambani “is said to have kept exotic pets at Sea-Wind, the Ambani clan’s joint home in Mumbai,” Rajshekhar wrote. “More recently, the family has been erecting outbuildings for ‘reptiles, marsupials, [and] flightless birds’ at their county estate in the United Kingdom.”
Map of Vantara.
Built in buffer space around petrochemical complex
Anant Ambani reportedly began keeping a private menagerie in his early teens, even then managing it as a sanctuary for animals in need.
Anant Ambani then expanded the menagerie from ten acres to fifteen, improving the facilities and animal care as he learned more about wildlife and their needs.
Vantara, a vast expansion of the original concept, began on a 230-acre parcel in the buffer space around the perimeters of Anant Ambani’s father Mukash Ambani’s Reliance petrochemical complex in Rajasthan state, near Jamnagar city.
The petrochemical complex opened in 1997. Plans for Vantara, property of the Ambani family-funded Reliance Foundation, were first disclosed in 2019.
Media reports describing Vantara as a work in progress appeared increasingly often beginning in 2021. The initial target date for completion was said to be 2023, but as the project became bigger and more ambitious, the completion date was repeatedly pushed back.
Then-Indian cabinet minister for animal welfare Maneka Gandhi & elephant Loki/Murthy in 1998.
Fulfills ambition of Maneka Gandhi
Vantara grew to include, in addition to the primary site shown in the 2019 master plan, multiple additional perimeter parcels, with eleven distinctly separate areas for, among other species, elephants; rhinos; birds and nonhuman primates; leopards, tigers, caracals, and other mammalian predators; and crocodilians.
Many of these areas are not fully contiguous to the others; some are completely separate.
As a whole, Vantara resembles a fantasy first described to ANIMALS 24-7 by Maneka Gandhi, founder of the Indian national animal advocacy organization People for Animals, around the time Anant Ambani started school.
Maneka Gandhi, formerly Indian minister of state for forests, wildlife, and animal welfare, had become unhappily aware that there were few if any suitable places to send wild animals liberated by court order from substandard zoos, circuses, temples, advertising agencies, and neglectful private owners.
Wildlife SOS cofounder Kartick Satyanarayan with rescued elephants. (Wildlife SOS photo)
Similar to Wildlife SOS––but much bigger
Maneka Gandhi in 1995 helped Wildlife SOS founders Kartick Satyanarayan and Geeta Seshamani to establish three sanctuaries for former dancing bears, after dancing bear exhibition was outlawed. She later helped Wildlife SOS to start sanctuaries now housing elephants, tigers, and leopards, among other species.
But the need for rescue facilities capable of providing rescued animals quality care for life continued to greatly outstrip the fundraising capacity of Wildlife SOS and the several other sanctuary organizations that accepted injured and/or confiscated wildlife.
Worse, as recently as 20 years ago, according to Maneka Gandhi, there was not one internationally accredited wildlife veterinarian in all of India, not even among the employees of the biggest zoos. Maneka Gandhi dreamed of establishing a facility where Indian veterinarians already trained to treat cattle, sheep, goats, camels, equines, and dogs could learn to treat the wider spectrum of wildlife.
Today, among the 2,700 Vantara staff are reportedly 80 fulltime wildlife veterinarians, 30 of them assigned full-time to looking after the 200 resident elephants.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“This is my passion project”
“This is my passion project,” Anant Ambani recently told an audience on X, formerly Twitter. “We have made a veterinary hospital with state-of-the-art technology. The hospital has MRI and CAT scan machines, endoscopic robotic surgery machines, and six surgical theaters.
“We also fit prosthetics for the animals at the hospital here.”
So why are Anant Ambani and Vantara about as popular among many animal advocates as dengue mosquitoes?
Anant Ambani’s lavish three-day pre-wedding festivities in March 2024, less than a month after Vantara was formally opened to media on February 26, 2024, and his even more lavish July 2024 wedding to Radhika Merchant had a lot to do with it.
Ivanka Trump with a Vantara elephant.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Ivanka Trump posed with an elephant
Among the 1,000 guests were Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, and U.S. president Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who posed with an elephant wearing in traditional festive regalia.
“The use of an elephant in this way seemed more about promoting prestige than that of welfare or conservation,” objected international wildlife trafficking expert Daniel Stiles in a January 27, 2025 Medium essay entitled “Greenwashing on an industrial scale with billionaire’s private zoo in India.”
“Anant Ambani said in a video interview with India Today prior to the party,” wrote Stiles, “that no wildlife would be ‘exposed for entertainment’ for his guests, and that safaris [tours of the animal quarters] would be ‘solely for educational purposes.’ But the photo of Ivanka Trump has sparked concerns of his use of wildlife for personal entertainment.”
It is unlikely, however, that the elephant involved, previously exhibited day in and day out, all day every day, likely at many previous weddings before coming to Vantara, had any objection at all to helping the newlywed Ambanis to celebrate.
Salman Khan faces justice.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Salman Khan
More problematic was the presence of Salman Khan, 59, Bollywood movie actor, director, and among the most notorious convicted poachers in Indian history––and also much more likely a friend of Anant Ambani’s father, 67, than of Anant Ambani himself.
(See “Bollywood” star Salman Khan sleeps on jail floor after 2nd poaching rap.)
“Press reports,” Stiles continued, “claim that Vantara consists of ‘a space of 3,000 acres within the Green Belt of Reliance’s Jamnagar Refinery Complex in Gujarat, converted into a jungle-like environment that mimics the natural, enriching, lush and verdant habitat for the rescued species.’”
Boasted a handout distributed at the pre-wedding party, “Over the years, we planted more than ten million trees in this arid region, transforming it into a bustling green community, flourishing with flowers and fruits, and housing Asia’s largest mango orchard!”
Homemade nutritious elephant balls.
(Vantara photo)
Vantara is not just one location
Responded Stiles, “But a drone photo of the complex shows something quite different, a complex of several fenced enclosures with limited space in each.”
The drone photo, however, actually shows only one of the multiple Vantara habitats, which are not all adjacent to each other, and not even all visible from each other.
The complex as a whole is most easily seen via Google Earth, and at that is a loose cluster of highly irregular shapes amid sprawling industrial facilities.
“The Ambanis are worth about $80 billion, with an empire that has expanded to tech and e-commerce,” reported Alexander Sazonov and Bhuma Shrivastava for Bloomberg All India on February 20, 2021, taking note that Vantara is far from the only prestigious wildlife facility built in recent years by billionaires.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Other billionaire-built facilities
“Indonesian tycoon Low Tuck Kwong is another one who built a zoo, near the coal mining company that made his fortune,” Sasonov and Shrivastava wrote. “Georgia’s richest man and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili reportedly spent at least $3 million on a dendrological park that drew criticism as phantasmagorical scenes of giant trees floating on the Black Sea circulated online.
“Filipino billionaire William Belo got into crocodiles because of a poultry problem,” Sasonov and Shrivastava continued. “After starting an egg farm in 1989, Belo had to figure out what to do with the chickens who were no longer able to lay. The solution: feed them to crocodiles. His farm supplies their skins to luxury brands, while the meat goes into food products including Hungarian sausages and a local delicacy called sisig.”
But the Ambani family, who are religious Hindu vegetarians, have no such ideas.
Spix’s macaw. (Beth Clifton collage)
4,700 animals
Wrote the Vantara critic Rajshekhar, “Between 2019 and today, the two principal building blocks of Vantara – the Radhe Krishna Temple Elephant Welfare Trust and Greens Zoological, Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre – have indeed amassed an extraordinary assemblage of wildlife, including multiple endangered species.”
Anant Ambani, Rajshekhar said, in February 2024 “pegged the number of birds and animals at Vantara at over 4,700, from an unspecified number of species.”
Altogether, Vantara houses “857 marsh crocodiles, 229 leopards, 76 “hybrid” lions, 71 tigers, more than 1,200 iguanas, and 225 African spurred tortoises, not to mention Nile crocodiles and saltwater crocodiles and Siamese crocodiles and gharials, grizzly bears and black bears, African lions and cheetahs, Nile hippopotamuses, chimpanzees, an orangutan, a Komodo dragon, and more,” Rajshekhar listed.
The “more” includes 26 Sphix macaws, native to Brazil, extinct in the wild and formerly surviving in captivity only at a Brazilian captive breeding facility. There are reportedly now other captive colonies in Germany and Qatar. This ensures that the species will not be lost to a natural disaster such as Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which destroyed the last known specimens of the dusky seaside swallow.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Care in transportation
“Vantara has poached veterinary and animal care staff from conservation organizations across India,” Rajshekhar mentioned, but by “poached” meant “hired away at better salaries,” opening up opportunities for new personnel to be brought into the wildlife care field and trained.
“Convoys moving animals to Jamnagar are well-provisioned, with vets and an ambulance riding along,” Rajshekhar conceded.
This is in contrast with the circumstances in 2008 when the Alipore Zoo tried to move an eleven-year-old male giraffe, Sundar, to the Nandankanan Zoo in Bhubaneswar, in an open truck. Snagged in electric wires 12 hours into the journey, Sundar suffered burned ears and a dislocated hip from falling, and did not survive the ordeal.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Anonymous sources
Most of Rajshekhar’s criticisms were relayed from anonymous sources, many of whom appear to have been protecting their own perceived turf.
For example, Rajshekhar wrote, “A senior forest officer in eastern Assam asked why even healthy elephants from the area were being sent to Jamnagar, well over 3,000 kilometers away by road. ‘Even if elephants have to be removed from logging camps,” the unnamed forest officer said, “they should come to the forest department, where they are needed for patrolling. Captives will have a better life with us,” the forest officer claimed, despite a history of scandals involving alleged mistreatment of elephants at logging camps and of forestry departments complaining of a surplus of elephants to feed and look after.
“They [the elephants at forestry camps] are kept in semi-wild conditions,” the anonymous forest officer continued, “not in sheds but out in the open. They forage. They are better socialized. They even mate with wild elephants.’”
But the Vantara elephant facilities include considerable semi-wild habitat too, and producing a surplus of already surplus captive elephants is obviously not an appropriate goal.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Nowhere to run”
Rajshekhar also raised “the question of whether Jamnagar, even with all its sparkling animal-care facilities, is actually a suitable place for all the animals it holds,” which is completely beside the point, because it is a place for animals to go who have nowhere else to go, where efforts are being made, at any expense, to try to compensate for whatever deficiencies the climate offers.
“The idea, when all this started, was good,” another anonymous source told Raishekar. “They wanted sick, suffering elephants from places like circuses and temples. “The Trust was set up “to provide life-time care for suffering elephants. That has somehow changed to ‘We want numbers’.”
A more realistic assessment: as any animal shelter or sanctuary soon discovers, any added capacity is almost immediately overwhelmed by the numbers of animals in need.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Why anonymity & non-disclosure agreements?
“Until the recent publicity push,” Raishekar continued, “Reliance itself largely kept mum on Vantara. A clutch of animal-rights activists and forest officers have been invited to Jamnagar in the last two years or so, but, as a member of one such group told me, the trip was tightly controlled, and the visitors could not see all the relevant facilities.”
This, however, is only normal for animal care facilities, where potentially dangerous animals are kept, and also for construction sites.
“Most of the current and former employees at Greens and the Trust whom I contacted declined to speak,” Raishekar said, “and I was told that employees have been required to sign non-disclosure agreements.”
That may be excessive, but also might be a pretext for Raishekar using anonymous sources on topics where no one’s life or employment is likely to have really been in danger.
Indian mugger crocodile. (Beth Clifton collage)
Madras Crocodile Bank Trust
“Most of the forest department officials I reached out to in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Gujarat also declined to comment,” Raishekar added, but asking officials in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh to comment, sight unseen, on facilities in Gujarat is like asking someone in the Everglades who has never been to Wyoming or Montana to comment on Yellowstone National Park.
Some of the Vantara elephants arrived, recounted Raishekar, after “Maneka Gandhi, then a cabinet minister, contacted Reliance asking if it could house some rescued circus elephants.”
The 857 marsh crocodiles, also called muggers, came from Madras Crocodile Bank Trust.
Explained Raishekar, “The organization, set up in 1976 after the Tamil Nadu state government asked the herpetologist Rom Whitaker to run a breeding and release program for crocodiles to boost their numbers in the wild, has been struggling ever since an Indian government order in 1994 stopped the wild release of captive-born crocodiles.
“By 2020, the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust which had started with 30 muggers, had seen their numbers rise to 1,820.”
Pablo Escobar, owl monkeys, & hippo.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Hippos from Colombia
Vantara, said Raishekar, “is also trying to obtain, in partnership with the privately-owned Ostok Sanctuary in Mexico, 60 hippos from Colombia,” descended from four who escaped from the deceased cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar’s estate in 1993, establishing a thriving feral population.
(See Jail break for Colombian owl monkeys; hippos remain on the lam.)
“Jamnagar also now hosts a reported 250 big cats rescued from Mexico,” according to Raishekar. Most of these animals were seized in 2022 from the Black Jaguar-White Tiger Foundation, a self-styled rescue and rehabilitation center founded by the businessman Eduardo Serio. In 2022, Serio’s foundation was shut down after distressing footage emerged of starving, emaciated animals that had, in some cases, begun eating themselves.”
(Beth Clifton photo)
African dealings
Next, Raishekar recalled, Vantara “sought permission from India’s environment ministry to source a whopping 531 animals – including 50 hybrid lions, 40 hybrid tigers, 40 cheetahs, 10 servals and 20 giraffes – from Akwaaba Lodge & Predator Park, a privately-owned wildlife park in South Africa, set up by a South African of Indian descent named Naseer Ahmed Cajee.
“Unfair Game, a 2020 book on this industry, describes Akwaaba as a ‘supplier of big cats to the canned hunting industry and to the illegal tiger and lion bone industry.’”
“Akwaaba owner Nazeer Cajee,” summarized Daniel Stiles in his criticism of Vantara, “explained [to media] that the park had lost income when tourism had dried up due to the COVID-19 pandemic and he was no longer able to maintain its animals. Cajee said that to save them he had reached out to Vantara.
Leopard at Vantara. (Vantara photo)
Leopards
Vantara bought Akwaaba out of business, much as the Austrian-based international wildlife charity Four Paws (Vier Pfoten) bought “supplier of big cats to the canned hunting industry” Marius Prinsloo out of business in 2006, converting the former Prinsloo premises into the renowned Lionsrock sanctuary that now accommodates wildlife rescued from substandard zoos and circuses all over the world.
The Indian Central Zoo Authority authorized Vantara to take in “only 52 leopards,” Raishekar mentioned, “but Shyamal Tikadar, the “chief wildlife warden of Gujarat at the time, gave it approval to keep 229 leopards.”
Either 52 or 229 leopards would be well beyond the needs and capacity of even a very large nonprofit zoo economically dependent on admission fees and concession sales, but the Reliance Foundation is funded by a private endowment, set up in the expectation that Vantara will continue operating long beyond the anticipated lifetime of Anant Ambani.
White liger––lion/tiger hybrid––at Big Cat Rescue.
(Beth Clifton photo)
“No biodiversity conservation value”
“Another suspect supplier,” reported Stiles, “is Fauna Zoo de Mexico, which so far has sent 286 animals of 17 species to Vantara, including dozens of hybrid lions and tigers, of no biodiversity conservation value.”
Which may be just the point. Animals “of no biodiversity conservation value” are unwanted these days among accredited zoos, but to Anant Ambani, a self-described “very religious Hindu,” their lives have value as individuals.
Stiles details dozens of Vantara transactions with “suspect suppliers” that appear to have in common an effort to acquire animals in need of homes from whatever the source, by purchase if necessary.
(Beth & Merritt Clifton collage)
Self-defeating?
This sort of effort is usually self-defeating. Attempts to buy puppy mills and horse auctions out of business, for instance, have bankrupted generations of would-be puppy and horse rescuers, without reducing either the puppy mill or horse auction industry at all.
On the other hand, at age 29 Anant Ambani may still be learning what tactics are effective. Meanwhile, the worst that Vantara can be accused of is improving many individual animals’ lives at possible expense to international efforts to curtail wildlife trafficking through lightly enforced regulations and often corrupt regulatory agencies.
Possibly the most damning part of Stiles’ critique of Vantara, to most of his readers, may be a sentence mentioning a purported partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, which both the IUCN and WWF have denied exists.
Beth & Merritt with some of our friends.
(Beth Clifton collage)
But Vandara apparently never claimed having any such partnership. Rather, the claim appears to have originated with a local promoter of bus tours of what can be seen of the facilities from the outside, absent any real knowledge or understanding of what goes on inside.
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