Giving the dolphins their due
Ravindra Kumar Sinha has spent most of his life along the Ganga, worrying about the Gangetic river dolphin. He remembers being mesmerised the first time he saw them. He was seven, and a pod of the dolphins were leaping in and out of the water at Patna. “It seemed like the river was full of them.”
Having aced biology in school and junior college, he eventually completed a Bachelors degree and a Masters in zoology. “In my free time, I would sit on the banks of the river near the Patna university and watch the dolphins emerge from the water,” says Sinha, now 67.
He would go on to teach zoology at the university, and earn a PHD in the hydrobiology of the Ganga. This meant studying the river, its water quality, and species such as the otter, turtle and, of course, the Gangetic dolphin. So little had the Ganga’s hydrobiology been studied at that point that people warned him he was making a mistake. “But by then I had made up my mind.”
As part of his PHD, Sinha began to study something that had started to worry him: it seemed like there weren’t as many dolphins in the water as there used to be. He wasn’t wrong. When Sinha began work on his PHD in the 1980s, dolphins were still being indiscriminately slaughtered in the Ganga, mainly for their oil, which was prized as bait for catfish and for its supposedly medicinal and aphrodisiac properties. Coupled with a slow birth rate (dolphins only reach sexual maturity at age 10, gestation is nine months, and females have just one calf at a time), their population was plummeting. (While the slaughter stopped in the 1990s, a new threat now looms: pollution and the degradation of their habitat.)
The more he learnt, the more Sinha worried. “What would I do with my research if the species didn’t even survive,” he says. He began talking to fishermen, students, and policy makers about alternatives to catfish bait, and how the river and all life in it would suffer if the dolphin was lost.
In 1985, a boost came in the form of a Rs 28 lakh allotment under the central government’s Ganga Action Plan. “With the money, we funded more travel, more awareness campaigns, and bought equipment for the university’s zoology lab.”
In 2012, Sinha’s proposal to set up National Dolphin Research Centre, on the Patna University campus was accepted. It was inaugurated last month. Sinha is now vice-chancellor of the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University in Jammu. But the Centre is the literal concretisation of his legacy. “I used to worry that my research would all sit on a shelf in a library. I am now confident that this work will continue after me.”