Saving turtles: real threats but unreal protests?

Circa 2005, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello and Leonardo made an impromptu appearance in front of Bombay House, the head office of the Tata Group, in Mumbai. The four teenage mutant ninja turtles were on a new adventure, unauthorised, of course, by their creators.

This was a crusade to save their brethren, the olive ridley turtles of Odisha, by preventing the Tatas from building a port at Dhamra, which would ostensibly spell doom for the olive ridleys that nest at Gahirmatha. Led by campaigners such as Sanjiv Gopal and Shailendra Yashwant, the turtles held up banners that said “Don’t say Tata to turtles”. The campaign led by Greenpeace India did not end here.

Greenpeace put out advertisements in newspapers in 2009 comparing the Nano small car manufactured by the Tatas (cheap) and the olive ridley (priceless). A while later, Greenpeace launched a Pacman-like online video game, called “Turtle vs Tata”, where little yellow (olive?) turtles had to eat white dots (=healthy food) while avoiding Ratty, Matty, Natty or Tinku (the bad guys). In response, the Tatas launched a trademark infringement and defamation lawsuit against Greenpeace India.

But this was hardly the first time that Greenpeace had courted trouble. When they started their campaign in Odisha in early 2004, there was already tension between fishers, conservationists and the forest department. Though some of my colleagues and I warned them that their entry might exacerbate the situation, Greenpeace decided that it should address the problem of boundary demarcation for the Gahirmatha National Park.

When fishermen were caught fishing illegally inside the park, they often claimed that they didn’t know where the boundaries lay, and the forest department claimed that this made enforcement difficult. Greenpeace decided that if they performed public service by demarcating the boundaries with buoys, both the fishermen and the forest department would be grateful.

Greenpeace consulted with the local forest department as well as fishers and received what they thought was support for this activity. Organised as a big media event, Greenpeace invited one of their key supporters, film actress Amala Akkineni, and sailed out to Gahirmatha from Paradip along with fishworkers and several observers.

I met Amala at a sea turtle workshop in Visakhapatnam in April 2015, and we talked about the Gahirmatha trip and conservation in general. An avid diver and a turtle enthusiast from the time she rescued a sea turtle hatchling as a child, Amala had supported Greenpeace programmes for many years. She helped raise funds for the buoys and was later involved in a stray-dog sterilisation programme along the central Odisha coast, aimed at reducing predation of turtle eggs.

Once they reached the park boundary, a group of dashing young activists threw their shirts off and themselves into the water. Amala recalled that it was really hot and they were all happy to be in the water for a while. Buoys were installed using GPS coordinates, and the crew returned, dare I say, buoyed by their success.

But sadly, the fishermen were not in the least happy that they could no longer profess ignorance about the boundaries and mumbled their discontent. And the forest department, the supposed beneficiaries, pulled Greenpeace up for entering a protected area without permission.

As a final episode in this saga, Greenpeace campaigners ran afoul of the law again when they brought dead olive ridley turtles to the capital, New Delhi, to get the attention of Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik.

They were then arrested on grounds of illegally handling and hunting a Schedule I animal, and spent two days in Tihar Jail. As absurd as the legal accusations against Greenpeace might have been, it is quite clear that the environmental NGO’s intent was to create publicity around the issue.

When I queried Amala about the fact that the issues that get the biggest publicity may not be the ones most important for conservation, she said: “You hear the shout, but not the whisper.” There is little doubt that the individuals concerned are deeply passionate and committed to conservation. But the question is: does the shouting help conservation or does it just help the NGOs? At heart, are environmental organisations any different from the corporations they claim to battle?

Conservation versus development

As Nicholas Mrosovsky noted, hype has characterised many of the conservation narratives in the last three decades, sometimes to the detriment of conservation itself. The early fishery drama in Odisha was no exception, as the exchanges between Davis et al and Frazier had demonstrated.

GM Oza, one of the actors in the original drama, was not done with that. A decade later, he published a brief note titled ‘Last chance to save olive ridley turtles in India’. Oza started by referring to their 1977 article where they lamented the absence of nesting at Gahirmatha. Further down the article, he noted that 3,20,000 turtles were reported to have nested during 1992.

Despite a decade-and-a-half of evidence that large numbers of ridleys were nesting at Gahirmatha, the title still painted a doomsday scenario. By now, however, the main cause for worry had changed. On the one hand, the incidental mortality in trawlers had become a concern. On the other, the talk of a port at Dhamra had begun. At the time, it was only a proposed expansion of the fishing port. Worse was to come.

Rockets and ridleys

As much as fishery related mortality dominated the headlines on turtle conservation, it was far from the only threat, and conservationists had to deal with a variety of problems, including development. The threats came from varied sources, including rockets, ports and oil exploration. But let’s start with rockets.

In 1986, Indraneil Das wrote about the establishment of a rocket testing range near Gahirmatha. According to him, the government had decided to shift the missile testing range from Balasore to Satabhaya (near Gahirmatha) because of protests from local people. A national sea turtle specialist group which had been formed at the time recommended the creation of a marine national park at Gahirmatha. Shortly afterward, the government decided to establish the rocket testing range in Balasore to the north and not in Gahirmatha.

However, short-ranged missiles have a range of about 700 km, and could be fired eastward, but beyond this they would reach the Myanmar coast. Long-ranged missiles (with a range of more than 2,000 km) needed to be fired southward, which is why Baliapal block in Balasore had been chosen. After several years of dealing with local protests, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) gave up on this site and decided to establish their testing range at Wheeler Island at a considerable cost.

Strangely enough, the rhetoric died shortly thereafter, and the DRDO established the missile testing range on Outer Wheeler Island, not more than a few kilometres from the mass-nesting beaches at the Ekakula sandspit, with little protest from environmental groups. Eventually, the spit broke away from the mainland in 1989, and gradually moved across the river mouth.

In the 1990s, Bivash Pandav’s field research camp was located at Long Wheeler Island (Babubali island), and nesting occurred on the two fragments of the spit, Nasi 1 and Nasi 2, a short boat ride away. An equally short boat ride separated the two Wheeler Islands. On one was a modern missile testing range, a road and railway line that ran the length of the island, accommodation for the staff, an officers’ club and so on. On the other, we lived in fishermen’s huts and worked out of a single large tent.

Bivash Pandav and other turtle biologists and conservationists were then protesting about the lights that came from this island and likely misoriented the hatchlings. In 1997, at the inauguration of the MTSG Northern Indian Ocean Workshop in Bhubaneswar, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, the future president of India (then the chief scientific adviser to the prime minister and the secretary of DRDO), gave an assurance that lights would be turned off during the nesting season. In response to petitions and pleas, the Wheeler Island management did sometimes turn the lights down during turtle nesting season, but the request usually had to be renewed each season.

But this was not the only threat that the defence establishment posed. While we were working on the mass-nesting beach in 1999, dogs had started to cross from Outer Wheeler Island to the beach during low tide. By the late 2000s, Nasi 2 island made contact with Wheeler Island, creating a variety of problems, including depredation of eggs by dogs, obstruction of turtles due to beach armouring and so on.

Excerpted with permission from From Soup to Superstar: The Story of Sea Turtle Conservation Along the Indian Coast, Kartik Shanker, HarperCollins India.