The Gaj Gaurav Award was instituted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change to recognise work done at the frontline of elephant conservation — by field officers, forest staff, mahouts and private custodians of captive elephants, rather than by administrators or researchers. It was conferred for the first time on World Elephant Day in 2022, when the Malasar tribesmen of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu, who work as mahouts and cavadis at the Kozhikamuthy and Varagaliar elephant camps, were chosen as the inaugural recipients. That choice set the character of the award: it goes to people who work in physical proximity to elephants, often at personal risk. The 2026 list kept to that pattern. Seven mahouts attached to Jaldapara in West Bengal were honoured for rescue work during severe floods — Bikash Kharia and Rajiv Oraon for protecting six stranded captive elephants, and Ajibul Haque, Ajit Gabur, Momtaz Alam, Amasur Kharia and Dilip Munda for guiding thirteen displaced wild rhinoceroses to safety. Odisha forest officer Jugal Nayak was honoured posthumously for losing his life while protecting elephants.

Human-elephant conflict is the central problem of Indian elephant conservation, and it is a southern problem above all: the Western Ghats landscape holds the largest share of India's wild elephants, and Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh account for a large part of annual conflict casualties. A regional action plan across those four states matters because elephants move along corridors that cross state lines while forest administration stops at them — a mitigation measure that ends at a border simply displaces the animals rather than the conflict. The Andhra Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister told the gathering that deploying trained 'kumki' elephants had cut human fatalities in forest-fringe areas by 70 per cent, which points to the same conclusion from the other direction: the measures that work are operational and local, and the award exists to recognise the people who carry them out.