In the sandbanks of Bihar’s Gandak River a long-snouted reptile lies motionless on a stretch of pale sand, its jaw pointed towards the current.
A few metres away, fishermen untangle their nets while children walk along the embankment to school. There was a time when the sight of a gharial here would have triggered panic. But today, in parts of the Gandak basin, people stop to protect it.
For years, in villages scattered across the Gandak’s floodplains, any crocodile attack was blamed on gharials. Few people distinguished between the critically endangered gharial and the mugger crocodile, a different species known to attack humans.
That confusion pushed one of the world’s rarest reptiles closer to disappearance.
“Gharial is not a problem animal. Gharial has never attacked humans,” Dr Samir K Sinha, Chief Ecologist at Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), told The Better India while speaking about the Gandak Gharial Recovery Project.
Unlike mugger crocodiles, gharials are fish-eaters. Their long, narrow snouts are adapted for catching fish, not large prey. Shy by nature and highly sensitive to disturbance, they avoid humans whenever possible.
But along the Gandak, fear had already shaped public perception.
“The common psyche treats mugger attacks as gharial attacks,” Dr Sinha said. “It has taken a lot of time for people to understand that gharial and mugger are different animals.”
That misunderstanding was dangerous because the Gandak River basin holds one of the few remaining breeding populations of gharials anywhere in the world, and the second-largest breeding population after the Chambal.
Around 2014 and 2015, conservation efforts in the Gandak intensified through collaboration between the Bihar Forest Department, Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Photograph: (Subrat K Behera)
Categorised as Critically Endangered by the IUCN Red List, the gharial has suffered one of the sharpest declines among reptiles in South Asia.
Once widespread across the river systems of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus, Irrawaddy and Mahanadi, the species is now restricted to scattered pockets in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. It has already disappeared from rivers in Bhutan, Myanmar and Pakistan.
By the early 1970s, wild gharial nests in India had dropped to single digits , according to government records cited by the Wildlife Trust Of India.
A river built for gharials
The Gandak is not an easy river to live beside.
Fast-flowing and constantly shifting course, it erodes riverbanks, floods settlements and redraws its own geography every monsoon. But the same qualities that make the river difficult for humans make it ideal for gharials.
High sandbanks rise along bends in the river, creating nesting grounds where females lay clutches of 40 to 50 eggs every year. The eggs incubate naturally under warm sand for months before hatchlings crack through the shells and crawl towards the water.
Even then, survival remains uncertain.
Floods can wipe out entire nests overnight. Erosion swallows breeding sites. Jackals, feral dogs and birds prey on hatchlings before they reach the river.
Only a handful survive long enough to become adults.
One of the most important clues in the Gandak recovery story did not come from satellite mapping or field equipment. It came from women speaking in Bhojpuri near the riverbank. Photograph: (Shantam Ojha)
“Their survival depends heavily on the river remaining undisturbed,” Dr Sinha explained.
Construction of dams and barrages, artificial embankments, destructive fishing practices, sand mining, and livestock movement have steadily reduced suitable habitat across the gharial’s range. The Gandak, too, has faced growing anthropogenic pressure over the decades.
Yet, the river still offered hope.
Around 2014 and 2015, conservation efforts in the Gandak intensified through collaboration between the Bihar Forest Department, Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
At the time, awareness about the river’s biodiversity was limited. Disturbance along nesting stretches was common, and anti-social activities often went unchecked.
Then came a breakthrough.
“In 2015, some gharials were released. Then in 2016, we realised breeding was happening naturally in the Gandak River,” Dr Sinha recalled.
The discovery transformed the project.
Conservation teams identified six nesting grounds along sandy riverbanks. In 2016, annual population monitoring later documented more than 250 gharials of different age groups in the river system, confirming the Gandak as one of the species’ most important remaining habitats globally.
But identifying nests was only the beginning.
Conservation from
There are no formal classrooms along the Gandak teaching people about gharials.
Most awareness campaigns happened on boats.
“There’s no training centre as such. We sit on boats and talk comfortably with the locals,” Dr Sinha said. “They should feel involved in the procedure because they live there. They are the best informers.”
The approach was effective.
Instead of treating villagers as outsiders to conservation, the project made them participants in it. Fishermen became nest locators and watchers. Locals began reporting poaching attempts and identifying vulnerable nesting sites before floods arrived.
During the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, community watchers helped save 94 gharial eggs from being washed away by riverbank erosion.
Over time, awareness drives, vernacular posters and repeated conversations slowly replaced fear with familiarity.
The vernacular media also played an important role in changing public perception.
“When people read about these incidents in their own language, they understand the importance of the situation better,” Dr Sinha said.
In villages where gharials were once treated as threats, residents now intervene to protect hatchlings.
Today, conservationists estimate that nearly 80 percent of the Gandak River stretch supports gharial presence. Photograph: (Madhumay Mallik)
One villager told The Better India that children earlier destroyed eggs or harmed baby gharials out of fear. “We teach the children not to harm them. Saving the gharial is our responsibility,” the resident said.
Another recalled: “Children once threw stones at a hatchling until it died. When we heard about it, we ran there. But by then the baby gharial was dead,” the villager said. “After that, we taught the children that killing gharials is wrong.”
For conservationists, these shifts in attitude are extremely important.
Because rivers survive when people living beside them begin to care what disappears from them.
The women who spotted the future
One of the most important clues in the Gandak recovery story did not come from satellite mapping or field equipment.
It came from women speaking in Bhojpuri near the riverbank.
In 2016, Dr Sinha overheard local women discussing a “Sugawa”- their term for a female gharial, identified by differences in the shape of its snout. Curious, he asked what they meant.
One of the women mentioned spotting a female gharial nearby.
“That very night gave us hope,” he recalled. “Four or five days later, we found six nests in the area.”
The observation became the first strong indication that breeding activity was taking place in the river.
Though women are often less visible in frontline conservation work because of social and logistical barriers, Dr Sinha says they are among the sharpest observers of river ecology.
A river that once feared losing its gharials is now welcoming 31 new ones.
In a heartening win for wildlife conservation, 31 gharial hatchlings from the first nest of the 2026 breeding season have been released into Bihar’s Gandak River.
The hatchlings emerged from a protected… pic.twitter.com/VXuXK5qIV4
— The Better India (@thebetterindia) June 9, 2026
“Women are very good observers,” he said. “They play a very important role in gharial conservation.”
Today, conservationists estimate that nearly 80 percent of the Gandak River stretch supports gharial presence.
But the species remains fragile.
Flooding and erosion continue to threaten nests every year. “Eighty percent of the foetuses died last year because of flooding and erosion,” Dr Sinha said.
A conservation and incubation centre is now being developed following a memorandum signed in 2022 to improve hatchling survival and strengthen long-term recovery.
A fifty-year fight against extinction
India’s modern crocodile conservation story began in 1975, when populations of gharials, muggers and saltwater crocodiles were collapsing across the country.
With support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), India launched the Crocodile Conservation Project to rescue the remaining wild populations.
The strategy involved collecting eggs from the wild, hatching them in protected centres and releasing juveniles once they grew large enough to survive in rivers. Programmes began in Odisha and Uttar Pradesh before expanding across multiple states.
The initiative eventually led to the establishment of 20 crocodile rearing and rehabilitation centres and 11 crocodile sanctuaries, including the National Chambal Sanctuary.
By 2025, the recovery effort had become one of India’s most successful wildlife conservation stories. According to WTI, India now hosts nearly 80 percent of the global gharial population, numbering over 3,000 individuals.
Yet conservationists warn that recovery cannot rely only on breeding centres or protected areas.
Gharials travel vast distances in search of undisturbed river systems.
One gharial released in Nepal’s Rapti River was later found more than 850 kilometres downstream in West Bengal’s Hooghly River in 2020.
Protecting one breeding population, therefore, protects entire river networks.
And gharials are not the only species benefiting from that protection.
“Protecting crocodile habitats automatically ensures that other key riverine wildlife, including the Ganges river dolphin, smooth-coated otters, northern river terrapins and a variety of birds and fishes also find safe haven,” Dr Sinha said.
Saving a species by changing a story
The Gandak recovery project was never only about increasing numbers.
It was also about dismantling a fear that had settled deep into public memory.
In many villages today, elders explain to children that the long-snouted reptile basking on a sandbank is not a man-eater. Fishermen who once viewed gharials with suspicion now report sightings to conservation teams. Local communities help monitor nests during the breeding season.
A species once pushed to the edge of extinction is surviving because people living closest to the river decided it deserved a future there.
