Ganges river dolphin in India faces extinction
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E-mail China Dialogue, October 12, 2012
Ravi Singh says even if the dolphin can adjust to pollution to some extent, its breeding is affected. There is a population downstream of Kanpur – a city in Uttar Pradesh notorious for its polluting factories – but no calves have been sighted among them. Healthier populations exist downstream of Allahabad, once the Yamuna meets the Ganga.
"The rapid decline in the number of dolphins across the country is of great concern and needs immediate attention," Singh adds. "WWF-India has adopted the Ganga river dolphin as a species of special concern and its work in the Upper Ganga river in the state of Uttar Pradesh has only confirmed that habitat and aquatic biodiversity conservation can succeed when the government, communities and civil society collaborate and work together towards this end."
Conservation efforts inadequate
There are wildlife sanctuaries in the basin – the Hastinapur sanctuary soon after the Ganga reaches the plains from the Himalayas, the Garh-Narora stretch (a Ramsar wetland site deemed of global significance), the sanctuary on the Chambal upstream of its confluence with the Yamuna and the Vikramshila sanctuary in the middle of the basin in Bihar state.
Forest departments of state governments are in charge of the sanctuaries, but their personnel are neither equipped nor trained to run riverine sanctuaries effectively.
WWF-India has been training them, and in the first week of October 2012 carried out a dolphin population census in the upper one-third of the Ganga basin in the Indian plains (the area in the map). This included programmes to sensitise people along the river banks about the perils being faced by the dolphins.
But the protected stretches are still too few and far between. Especially for an animal that keeps swimming up and down a river and is quite likely to swim out of a sanctuary, the only hope is to sensitise more and more of the people living along the river, so that they provide protection to the dolphin they have long revered.
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