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Photography Awards

Clashing Leopards, Flying Cormorants and Other Winners of the 2025 Sanctuary Wildlife Photography Awards

Rumna Mukherjee’s leopard photograph “Tough Love” took first prize in the 2025 Sanctuary Wildlife Photography Awards. The results also include a hawk-eagle, cormorants and fighting gharials.

By ThatPainter Team 3 min read
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Rumna Mukherjee won first prize in the 2025 Sanctuary Wildlife Photography Awards for “Tough Love,” a photograph of two leopards clashing high in a forest canopy in Rajasthan. The other highlighted results range from a hawk-eagle taking flight with the remains of a kill to cormorants seen from above and fighting gharials in a river.

Who won the Sanctuary Wildlife Photography Awards 2025?

The Sanctuary Nature Foundation organized the 2025 awards. Scroll reported that the ceremony took place in Mumbai on December 5, 2025; the organizer’s official results page confirms Rumna Mukherjee’s “Tough Love” as the First Prize winner.

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Scroll describes the awards as promoting wildlife conservation through photography. The Foundation says the wider Sanctuary Wildlife Awards annually recognize people working for wildlife and natural habitats in India, while the awards’ official event page says they were instituted to showcase contributions by India’s best wildlife photographers.

What are the winning wildlife photographs?

Placement Photographer and photograph What it shows
First Prize Rumna Mukherjee, “Tough Love” A male and female leopard locked in a clash high in a forest canopy. Scroll places the image in Jhalana-Amagarh Conservation Reserve in Jaipur, Rajasthan; the organizer describes the setting as Jhalana Leopard Safari Park, Rajasthan.
Second prize Adam Taylor, “A Flight of Life and Death” A Changeable hawk-eagle taking flight with the remains of a kill at Corbett Tiger Reserve, Uttarakhand.
Third prize Kuldeep Lodhi, “Cormorants Assemblage!” An aerial photograph of a congregation of cormorants patterning the water in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.
Editors’ Choice Aditya Agarwal, “Mortal Combat” Male gharials fighting in the Chambal River in Rajasthan.

The three prize-winning images show distinct subjects and action: a leopard encounter, a bird of prey in flight and a patterned gathering of waterbirds viewed from above. The placements are award results, not an objective ranking of photographic technique.

Who took the leopard photograph “Tough Love”?

Rumna Mukherjee took “Tough Love,” the first-prize image of a male and female leopard clashing high in the canopy. The two reports use different location names: Scroll identifies Jhalana-Amagarh Conservation Reserve in Jaipur, while the Sanctuary Nature Foundation calls it Jhalana Leopard Safari Park. Those descriptions are attributed to their respective sources here rather than treated as interchangeable names.

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What was the 2025 competition?

The 2025 call used the theme “Call of the Wild.” It was open to entrants of any nationality, with no age restriction, for images photographed anywhere on the Asian continent. Each entrant could submit up to five images; the listed deadline was September 7, 2025, at 11:59 p.m. These are details of the 2025 cycle, not current entry instructions.

For that cycle, the first-, second- and third-prize awards were Rs. 1,50,000, Rs. 75,000 and Rs. 25,000, respectively. The organizer required entrants to be sole authors and copyright owners. Its call also excluded captive or restrained animals, nesting-bird photographs and other specified non-wild subjects; it set out a restriction concerning Great Indian Bustard photographs, citing disturbance sensitivity and a government ban during breeding season. See the Sanctuary Nature Foundation for the contest’s exact eligibility wording and related context.

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Who judged the awards?

According to Scroll’s report, the jury included Sanctuary Asia founder and editor Bittu Sahgal, executive editor Lakshmy Raman, magazine team members Parvish Pandya, Saurabh Sawant and Prachi Galange, wildlife photographer and author Steve Winter, Wildlife Conservation Trust chief Anish Andheria, and wildlife photographer and field biologist Nayan Khanolkar.

The organizer describes the selection as a rigorous process intended to distill “the very best from thousands of hopefuls.” It does not provide an exact entry count in that statement.

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