Rom’s career as a conservationist took off when he visited Silent Valley, Kerala in 1971 and discovered the devastation to be caused by the construction of a dam. He brought this outrage to the attention of the Indian public in an article he wrote for the WWF newsletter. This caught the imagination of other environmentalists, wildlifers, journalists, and laypeople and a new phase in India’s environmental conservation movement was born. The politicians could not ignore this groundswell of opposition to the dam and all work was stopped in 1979 and Silent Valley declared a National Park in 1986.

India’s first snake breeding and public awareness facility began in Rom’s house in 1969.The reviled reptiles laboured under public persecution and education was badly needed to gain some sympathy for them. Thus was born the Madras Snake Park. It bred several endangered snakes like the king cobra, in captivity for the very first time. It attracted young people from neighbouring colleges who went on to become some of India’s first field biologists and professionals like Satish Bhaskar, J. Vijaya and Shekar Dattatri. No reptile was ignored - sea turtles, monitor lizards, crocodiles, freshwater turtles.

In the early 1970s hardly any attention was being paid to reptile conservation and Rom surveyed the rivers of India systematically to assess the status of the three species of crocodilians – the mugger, salt water crocodile and gharial.

All of them were teetering on the brink of extinction and a major Government initiative was begun and several Protected Areas were declared for the protection of these reptiles – the tri-state National Chambal Sanctuary, Katerniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary, Satkosia Gorge Wildlife Sanctuary and the Amaravathi Wildlife Sanctuary. Along with Zai Whitaker, he set up India’s only private captive breeding facility for crocodilians, the Madras Crocodile Bank in 1975.

In the heady days of the early 1970s Rom also campaigned for a ban on the exploitative snake skin industry. Since the late 1800s millions of pythons, cobras, rat snakes and vipers were killed every year for their skins. As a result the python had gone locally extinct in several places and other valuable, rodent-eating species were having a hard time surviving. Eventually the Government of India declared the trade in snakes illegal.

This act turned Rom’s friends, the Irula tribals who were supplying a lot of the snake skins, into criminals overnight. Moved by their utter state of destitution, Rom effected a transfer of technology so they could continue to earn a living doing what they knew best. Rom had worked under Bill Haast of the Miami Serpentarium, the world’s then largest venom producing lab and had learnt the technique of venom extraction.

He organized the Irula tribals into a cooperative, trained them in the extraction of venom from snakes, and the vacuum drying process. Then he lobbied hard with the Government to make an exception to the law and allow the cooperative to produce venom for the manufacture of the life-saving antivenom serum, the only cure for snakebite. The fact that the snakes would be released alive after three weeks turned the lawmakers in his favour and the Irula Tribal Snake Catchers Industrial Cooperative Society was born.

Over the course of the following decades, Rom campaigned with the passion of a religious zealot for the creation and preservation of a variety of habitats – the Guindy National Park, the Gulf of Mannar Biosphere Reserve, and the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve.

Today, he is the active Co-Chairman of the Gharial Multi-Task Force set up in 2004 when the alarm bells began ringing for the gharial. Despite three decades of Project Crocodile, the numbers of gharial plummeted to a low of less than 200 adults in the wild. As Coordinator, he co-drafted the case for the IUCN uplisting of the gharial as a Critically Endangered animal, one step away from extinction. He’s networking with other conservation organizations like WWF (India, Pakistan, Bhutan and Nepal), Aaranyak and Ecosystems-India (Assam) and state governments for an integrated conservation policy that will guarantee safe habitat for the gharial.

Lest this give the impression that Rom single-handedly achieved all this, it should be said that a lot of other people were involved and credit should go to them as well.