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Fighting for survival
SUKKUR: “The day I see a dolphin die, a part of me dies with it. It’s like mourning for your own child,” says a weather-beaten Nazir Mir Bahar, originally a mohanna (indigenous fishing community of the Indus). A game watcher, Bahar has been with the government’s Sindh Wildlife Department (SWD) and has been on the River Indus since the time he can remember and cannot think of ever being away from it.
“I was born on a boat and we lived on it. My father, Karam Illahi, was the first local fisherman hired by a renowned cetacean scientist, Georgio Pilleri, who did an intensive study of dolphins.” Recalling nostalgically how he would accompany his father on every trip for dolphin sightings, ever since he was six or seven, Bahar says, “Now I want to pass this skill on to my son, for who can feel for this harmless river creature the way a mohanna can? Who knows the river the way we do?” he asks, not at all perturbed that his 12-year-old son Nadir, is completely unschooled.
However, like so many other people of his community, the family have had to bid goodbye to their traditional occupation and lifestyle and come ashore to find some other métier. “We owned as many as 200 boats and fishing was the only occupation we knew.” But with time, they have had to sell all their boats and buy a piece of land near the embankment where they live, under sub-human condition and little education, while trying to meet ends by working on daily wages.
“There are some 100 households here,” says Bahar pointing to the bank, adding, “most have gone away in search of other means of livelihood.” There is a buzz of activity at the river bank. Women are washing clothes, utensils, even bathing their young ones in the murky turbid water next to the makeshift toilets on stilts. A few yards away are a dozen or so submerged buffaloes lazily sunning.
Indus Dolphins (Platanista gangetica minor) is a freshwater dolphin, known locally as Bhulan, and are in total an estimated 1,100 by a joint survey carried out in 2001 by the Worldwide Fund For Nature (WWF), Pakistan. An endangered species, and on IUCN’s Red List, the brownish-pinkish mammal has lived side by side the mohannas since times immemorial.
The other sub-species, Ganges Rives Dolphin (Platanista gangetica gangetica) is found in River Ganges and its tributaries as well as Brahmaputra, Meghna, Karnaphuli and Sangu river systems of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. It is known as Susu in India and is essentially identical in appearance with long, pointed snout that thickens towards its end, with its upper and lower jaw sets of teeth visible even when the mouth is closed.
“Because the water is murky, over centuries this dolphin has been rendered virtually blind. However, nature has endowed it with a terrific sonar system, so highly developed, that they can navigate and hunt for food using eco-location,” explains Hussain Bux Bhagat, deputy conservator, SWD, Sukkur. Bhagat has been studying the dolphin for over a quarter of a century and has been heading dolphin surveys in Sindh since 1996 where dolphin population is the highest.
Unfortunately, the dolphin today, is fighting a losing battle for survival, quite like their human counterparts. “Big and small dams and irrigation barrages has shrunk their habitat further with issues like agricultural run-off, industrial waste continuously being spewed into the river, scarcity of water and less catch. Also, licenses are given to affluent contractors who go for non-selective fishing methods (use of chemicals to benumb the fish so it comes on the surface) instead of preferring the indigenous community (who still practice traditional selective methods such as single hook and lines, cast-nets and seine nets) which has made it impossible for both man and the dolphin to fend for themselves,” says Bhagat.
River biodiversity was not given importance when the Indus irrigation system was being developed. However, all is still not lost. With talks of big dams on the Indus underway, it is time to do environmental impact assessments to ascertain pre-development ecological conditions. Some environmentalists go so far as to say that if biodiversity is at stake due to developmental projects, then the latter should be done away with.
According to SWD’s latest survey to guage the trend and current population carried out this month, it was able to spot 820 dolphins in the river and channels between the Guddu and Kotri barrages (in Sindh) as opposed to 620 in 2001 in and around the same area.
However, this year, adds the conservator, the provincial departments were unable to do a complete survey of River Indus, skipping the portion from Taunsa and Guddu where, in 2001, the department in collaboration of WWF had reported 300 dolphins being sighted. “The survey could not be conducted due to the risk factor and lack of safety for our team,” says Bhagat.
According to Bhagat, a large part of the riverine tract is occupied by outlaws who have become permanent settlers there. These offenders who also give protection to the timber mafia and land grabbers, pose a serious kidnapping threat to our team of surveyors.
Along the river also reside some 15-20 tribal communities who have been clashing with each and do not care too much for intruders. “We had to meet the notables of the tribes and assure them that we were not from any intelligence agency or against them but just conservators trying to do our work quietly,” said Bhagat who feels it is vital to get the support of the local people in conservation efforts.
Absurd though it seems, another survey is also being carried out by the WWF as well, although theirs is being carried out after five years (when it had sought the help of SWD).
“It is not a separate survey. The current survey of SWD was part of one of their outputs of a project funded by the Sindh government and it is only limited to a particular stretch. Whereas WWF is looking for the entire stretch of Dolphin habitat,” explains Dr Ejaz Ahmed, deputy director general, WWF adding, “Our current survey is being carried out with other partners including the SWD.”
“The cause is the same, which is to protect the dolphins,” agrees Bhagat. The SWD and WWF have in the past carried out collaborative rescue missions regularly.
The dolphins stray into these narrow channels during monsoons when the canal gates are opened to maintain the flow at the barrages. “These dams have had a great impact on the dolphin population as it has curtailed the free movement of the creature. The population is now divided into five groups leading to fragmentation of the population and inbreeding and eventually infertility and thus extinction.
In 2000, the UNDP, under its Small Grant’s Programme, provided the SWD with funds and in the five years since then, the department partnered with the WWF and have rescued 75 dolphins, of which 56 were safely retuned to the river. This move received a lot of publicity. The department is now looking for funds to continue its rescue missions. “Perhaps the leftover unused funds from the SGP can be siphoned into this by extending the time period,” hopes Bhagat.
“The other way to resolve the issue of fragmentation of the dolphin population is to try and take the rescued dolphins, preferably a male, and release it upstream Guddu. However, this would be a very risky venture and we’d have to use a helicopter since the dolphin would not be able to survive a road journey.” With the SWD unable to fund such an experiment, Bhagat is eyeing the WWF’s new Wetland Project which has resources for a research and conservation component. “Perhaps it can test this hypothesis,” says Bhagat
“Our surveys are 200 percent accurate as we have experts who have doing surveys for the last 20 years,” says a confident Bhagat. “Earlier we had the experience and the expertise but not the equipment. Now we have both — the experienced manpower and state-of-the art global positioning system that can pinpoint exactly where the dolphins were seen, to do a survey of about 690kms of the river in 15 days.”
Pakistan has ratified the international Convention on Biodiversity and has therefore entered into a treaty to protect threatened species. An important outcome of a South Asian River Dolphin Workshop, held in 1999 in Lahore, led to nominating two areas as Indus Dolphin Reserve — between Guddu and Sukkur and between Guddu and Taunsa bar.
Bhagat attributes the steady increase of dolphin population between the Sukkur-Guddu portion of the River Indus to the latter being declared a protected area where hunting is controlled and fishing completely discouraged. However, legislations and their strict enforcement are still needed with regards to discharge of harmful pollutants, looking into environmental impacts of development projects.
The writer <zofeen28@hotmail.com> is a freelance contributor
Of bygone days
SEPTUAGENARIAN Sonari is as blind as the Indus Dolphin but she can vividly recall the “good times when the river was vast, cleaner and deeper, and we ruled it”.
She has seen many a bhulan in her lifetime, even females that carried their babies on a flipper — an almost rare sight — , river crocodiles known as gharial (also endangered). As a fisherwoman, she used to catch big river fish and swam in the water along their side, and was contented in her simple lifestyle under the open skies.
“I was happiest when we lived on the boat and had enough to eat. Since we broke ties with the water, we’ve not only lost our livelihood but also grown poorer by the day. It’s just not the same,” she says superstitiously.
But Sassi, her 27-year old grand-daughter disagrees. “There was no food for us in the river and so we were forced to move to the river bank,” she argues. “The same water which my grandmother remembers so nostalgically was making us, specially our children sick.”
Ironic then that young Samina, just seven, and who can swim like all her friends, nods affirmatively when asked if she’s seen the “big fish”. “Yes, on TV,” she points to the small set at the far corner. All she knows of the mammal is that “it comes to the surface because it feels like it” and that she would be too afraid to go near this river creature that weighs between seven to eight feet and weighs 120 kgs as “it will eat” her.
— Z.T.E
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