| Turtles
1.29
lakhs turtles have died in the country in the last 13 years
What
makes something fascinating? Can a mere beautiful thing be fascinating?
Perhaps not. It's a mysterious streak, which can not be deciphered
easily, makes something captivating. Olive Ridley Turtles forces
you to take note precisely because they carry a magical phenomenon.
You never know where they are from, where they go; you just
watch them silently nest at a beach. Further mysterious, with
more than sixty percent of planet covered with water, they find
only three places to nest on this earth & one amongst them is
Orissa.
Why
they decide to visit Orissa is still not known, not just to
this reporter, but to research scholars also who have spent
lives studying them. What is known, is their visit to Orissa,
half a million mother turtles congregate, leave the seas, enter
the sandy beach, dig nets, lay eggs & within forty five minutes
leave the beach for seas never to return again, leaving eggs
on their own. Another mystery, possibly the only creature to
spend so little time with its off springs.
This
magic of nature is however, under threat. Oil drilling, port
construction or simply fishing. Turtles are killed in thousands
every year & over 1.29 lakhs turtles have died in the country
in the last 13 years even as Ridley Turtles are Schedule One
specie under 1972 Wildlife Protection Act & entitled to protection
similar to tigers & elephants.
Ironically,
government announced Project Sea Turtle couple of years before,
but it is yet to take off.
Turtles
: NGO Interventions
'Operation
Kachhapa’; Conservation of the Olive Ridley Sea Turtle
Unfortunately, on the Orissa coast,
about 16,000 fishing boats operate during the winter season.
Some 8,000 of these boats are large mechanised fishing trawlers
and gill-netters that flout laws prohibiting mechanised fishing
within five kilometres of the shoreline. Turtles are injured
by the boats’ propellers and slaughtered in the fishing nets
- a staggering total of 100,000 dead turtles have been washed
ashore in the past decade, almost all of them breeding adults.
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Operation
Kachhapa - NGO Initiative to protect Olive Ridleys in Orissa
The East Indian State of Orissa is
one of only three sites in the world where the mass nesting
of Olive Ridley turtles occurs. Three beaches in Orissa play
host to this amazing natural phenomenon: the Nasi Islands inside
Gahirmatha Marine Sanctuary, and the mouths of the Devi and
Rushikulya rivers. In the early 1990s conservationists observed
an increasing number of dead turtles being washed ashore along
the Orissa coast. During the last ten years, over 100,000 dead
adult Olive Ridley turtles have been recorded on these beaches
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