Ganga’s missing dolphins

The sun is riding high by the time we polish off a plate of puris and parval bhaji topped with a sickly-sweet, thickly curled jalebi.

Our boatman Pramod — a tall, dark, smooth-skinned man with sharply angled features — is waiting for us on the banks of the Ganga. At the ghat, we find women in wet saris and pot-bellied, bare-chested men, immersed in the river, using tiny aluminium pots to pour the holy water over their heads.

We clamber onto the boat and head east. The river, a sparkling bright green in the morning sun, stretches ahead of us. With me are Nachiket Kelkar, a young, soft-spoken researcher with Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment and Subhasis Dey, a spirited, deeply empathetic researcher with Vikramshila Biodiversity Research and Education Centre. Both are walking, talking encyclopedias on the ecology of river dolphins and fisheries in this region, having worked with communities on the river for over a decade.

Together, we are searching for dolphins in eastern Bihar's Bhagalpur district. Here, a 67-kilometre stretch of the river that lies between the towns of Sultanganj and Kahalgaon is home to the Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary, the only reserve legally dedicated to India's national aquatic animal: the most ancient of all cetaceans, the blind, side-swimming, endangered Gangetic river dolphin or Platanista gangetica gangetica.

As we coast along the river, a row of toddy palms comes into view on the distant south bank. A couple of decades ago, the river lapped at those palms. Today, the waterline is about half a kilometre away.

It's our first visual marker of the extent to which flows in the Ganga have been steadily reducing: this year, the depth sensor tells us, it's at an all-time low.

Tear-shaped silt islands or diaras, dotted with clumps of sedge, grass and local vegetation, rise from the water. These islands that emerge from the river, and are reclaimed by it at will, are full of life. Two bright-beaked skimmers perch on one edge; lesser whistling teals brown an opposite edge; open-billed storks forage in the shallows; a row of hard-shelled tent turtles basking in the sun plop back into the river in sudden alarm at the putt-putt of our boat.

From the lower observation deck of this boat specially outfitted for dolphin surveys, three pairs of eyes — two experienced, one novice — seek signs of the trademark arc of soft grey, of a beak-like snout cleaving the surface to breathe, of the gentle curve of a dorsal fin diving back in: the Gangetic dolphin or “Soons,” which sounds the same as a nasally pronounced “sauce.”

We'd spotted one when we had pushed away from the shore, but have seen none since. This, my researcher friends point out, is unusual — in this season, 70-100 dolphin sightings is par for this short course.

We go past the four kilometer-long Vikramshila Setu (or bridge) at Bhagalpur and past the burning ghat. The Bhagalpur Engineering College hostel comes into sight — the marker for the outer limit of safe passage along the river. Beyond the college, men on horses roam the diaras with guns and black flags in hand, waylaying boats, looting and, occasionally, even killing those who refuse to comply with their demands.

HT