Damned Gharial
Tehelka, Feb 3, 2008
The gharial, which has outlived the dinosaurs, is on the brink of extinction. Can we revive conservation efforts to save this beleagured animal?
JANAKI LENIN, Conservationist
NOW IF YOU are the protagonist in a cliffhanger it doesn’t help to have an ungainly body and short stubby legs. And yet, the gharial has been hanging on the precipice of existence by its toenails for the last few decades. The survival of an animal that outlived the dinosaurs depends on whether we can give it a leg up over the abyss. The gharial’s body-plan is fine-tuned to make the best use of the habitat it had chosen for its final staging ground. It is a specialist like no other crocodile in the world; deep rivers to live in, sand banks on which to bask and lay eggs, and plenty of fish to eat are prerequisites. This choosiness ensured the survival of the gharial into the 20th century.
Today, however, these very same adaptations have become three nails in the gharial’s coffin. Developing India built mega-dams across rivers that were home to the gharial, silting them up. The building boom that began in the 1990s in nearby cities like Delhi and Agra is fed by sand from the gharial’s nesting grounds on the Chambal. Fishermen deplete its prey while fishing nets become underwater curtains of death.
In the 1970s, it was estimated that less than 200 gharial survived in Nepal and India. An ambitious crocodile conservation project was launched by the Government of India in collaboration with the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Project Crocodile was touted as one of the most successful conservation programs in the world, and yet no one has ever heard of it. Crocodile sanctuaries were established, a crocodile research institute set up and captive rearing stations built. The 425km long unsullied stretch of the Chambal was seen as the last long-term refuge of the gharial. Somewhere along the way, conservation action ground down due to lethargy and ineptitude.
Habitat protection is the first commandment in any conservation program but it could not be enforced in the Chambal ravines, ruled as they were by bandits and warlords. The other most significant habitat, the river Girwa in the Katerniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary, remains stable for now. Obtaining local people’s support is the second commandment, but it was deemed too difficult under the circumstances. Having thrown out the two most important tenets of conservation, what did Project Crocodile do?
Over the years it released thousands of expensively captive reared gharial into the rivers — the Chambal, the Girwa, the Ken, the Son and the Mahanadi. The released animals were not monitored so no one knows what became of them. But annual census figures showed a steady climb upwards. It was like adding apples to a basket and then counting them! When the number of gharial in the Chambal reached 1,200 in the mid-1990s, crocodile conservationists, biologists, bureaucrats and politicians basked in their achievement — the species had been saved from extinction. The Government of India stopped funding the captive rearing project, though state governments persisted with the releases on a smaller scale. The annual census stopped.
And then in 2004, the hollowness of gharial conservation was revealed. RK Sharma of the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department set off the alarm — gharial numbers were plummeting. With fewer apples being added to the basket, the numbers didn’t look so good anymore. Surveys in 2006 came up with less than 200 breeding adults in India and Nepal, thereby putting the gharial on the Critically Endangered category of the 2007 Red List. A task force called the Gharial Conservation Alliance (GCA) was formed with the express purpose of reversing this dismal trend. Realizing that river dolphins, otters and water birds had similar needs, the GCA in partnership with WWF-India set up River Watch. Instead of focusing on individual species and working separately, River Watch intends to look at the big picture — the state of our rivers.
EVEN AS this was being initiated, came the horrific news — nearly 90 out of about 320 sub-adult and adult gharials have mysteriously died over a 70km stretch of the lower Chambal in little over a month: a 25 percent mortality in the 2-2.5 metre size
class. The epicentre of this disaster is near Etawah in Uttar Pradesh, at the confluence of the Yamuna and Chambal. Post mortem reports indicated liver cirrhosis, cause unknown. Subsequent reports pointed to the presence of heavy metals in the tissue samples. Lethal levels of heavy metals should have killed the other animals sharing the same waters — fish, birds, otters and river dolphins — but it did not.
A team of international croc veterinarians are expected to arrive later this month to assist in finding the cause of this catastrophe and to suggest ways of stemming it. If the gharial overcomes this crisis, it will become the touchstone of our commitment to treat rivers as a precious resource.
