The blood of Olive Ridley sea turtles has again reddened Orissa's coastline. Over 2,000 carcasses of the endangered turtles have been found off the coast, a major wildlife organisation said.
According to the NGO, Operation Kachhapa, the turtles were killed by mechanised fishing trawlers and the bodies dumped by farmers away from the site of death. The deaths put a question mark over conservation of the turtles, which are found in India only on the Orissa coast. Over 1.29 lakh turtles have died in the country in the last 13 years.
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In Delhi, the ministry of environment and forest refused to comment, arguing the matter was a state subject. "At most, we can seek a report," a official said.
Aghast at the deaths, environmentalists are blaming the government for ignoring the warning signals.
"Incidents of turtles being killed due to the use of deep water trawlers have been on the rise in the last 10 years. We have asked both the environment ministry and Orissa government to stop deep-water trawlers within 10 kilometres of the coast. But it has not happened. The trawlers not only kill the fish and turtles near the coast, they also destroy the bio-mass that supports them," said Blinda Wright of Wildlife Protection Society of India.
The activists have also slammed the ministry of environment's decision to allow off-shore oil exploration in the area, arguing that it could have an adverse impact on the future of the species.
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Biswajit Mohanty, coordinator of Operation Kachhapa, was scathing of government inaction, alleging that endangered Olive Ridleys continue to be killed despite directions passed by the Supreme Court's Central Empowered Committee in April 2004.
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Biswajit Mohanty, coordinator of Operation Kachhapa, was scathing of government inaction, alleging that endangered Olive Ridleys continue to be killed despite directions passed by the Supreme Court's Central Empowered Committee in April 2004.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
