Every year, scores of female Olive Ridley turtles swim across the oceans, traversing thousands of miles of open sea to return to the beaches where they were born. Here, they construct a nest in the sand with their hind flippers, deposit their eggs in them and return to the ocean, leaving these eggs, which take 40-45 days to hatch, unattended.
The beaches of Honnavar in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka are among the few nesting sites of the olive ridleys in the country. Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed remembers walking across a kilometre-long stretch of shore in this region, trying to spot the sand-swathed nests of these aquatic reptiles. “I counted 31 clutches of eggs,” says the award-winning journalist, while moderating a panel discussion held at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC) in Bengaluru, earlier this week. Since each of those clutches held around 100 eggs “there must have been 3000 eggs over there,” he reminisces.
The discussion, which included filmmaker Vikas Badiger of the Faces of Bengaluru (FoB) Media Group, Sandeep Hegde of the Honnavar Foundation and Rajesh Govind Tandel, a member of the fishing community from a village in Honnavar, followed the screening of a new documentary titled The Ocean Connection.
The evocative film, made by FoB Media and supported by the Honnavar Foundation, explores the symbiotic relationship between the fishing community in Honnavar and these unique sea turtles. It also delves into a 2010 decision of the Karnataka government to build a port alongside an estuary of the Sharavati River and the danger this will pose to both the turtles and the livelihoods of the fishers in the region. “It is clear that this is a huge problem,” says Vikhar, recalling how the row of nests he observed was located precisely where the proposed port was supposed to come up. “And it has been going on for a long time, 14 years now.”
Olive Ridley turtle eggs. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRAGEMENT
Turtle Talk
The olive ridley is the smallest of the seven extant species of sea turtles and the most abundant, dwelling in the tepid waters of the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans. The animal, classified as ‘Vulnerable’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), takes its name from its distinctive yellow-green or olive hue of its rounded carapace or upper shell. While the actual number of individuals in the wild is unknown, it is estimated that there are around 800,000 nesting females, a number which is fast declining due to poaching, accidental entanglement in trawl nets and dissipating nesting sites.
While the beaches of Rushikulya and Gahirmatha in Odisha are the world’s largest mass nesting sites, other smaller ones exist along both the Malabar and Coromandel coastlines, including in Honnavar. “I have seen these turtles from my childhood,” says Rajesh, who hails from the village of Tonka 1 in Honnavar.
Rajesh, who belongs to the Kharvi community, is the president of Konkani Kharvi Samaja in Tonka and the Karavali Meenugaarara Karmikara Sangha. It took him some time to realise that the eggs that he found in the many cavities on the seashore belonged to the turtle, an animal venerated by this community, as it is considered to be one of the avatars of Lord Vishnu. “For the past few years, we have been actively involved in conserving these turtles with the support of the Forest Department,” he says, pointing out that since the fishing community spends so much time on the seashore, they can safeguard the sites and keep track of where the turtles lay their eggs. “We inform the Forest Department, and put a mesh around the nests to help conserve the species,” he says.
Turtle conservation activity takes place on the beach. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRAGEMENT
A People’s Struggle
According to a fact-finding report put together by a team of social activists, journalists and a lawyer who visited Honnavar in May 2023, the town is home to a 23,500-strong fishing community who mostly largely reside in the coastal villages of Tonka 1 and 2, Mallukurva and Pavinkurve, all of which come under the Kasarkod panchayat. “The great majority of residents of these villages are in the fish trade and, in fact, all sources of livelihood in this region are either directly or indirectly linked to fishing,” it states.
Not surprisingly, the Karnataka government’s decision, in 2010, to allow a private port to be developed on the land that houses these villages, has been met with considerable resistance from its inhabitants. Already, operations for producing dried fish have been affected at Tonka, with sheds being dismantled here in 2018 to make way for this port, a real blow to the community’s women who play an important role in cleaning, drying and preserving the catch. “Continuous protests were regularly mounted by the fisher community against the port after this,” adds the report.
Not only will the proposed port significantly impact the livelihood of the communities who live and work here, but it also poses a serious threat to the nesting habitat of the Olive Ridley turtles and the diverse estuarine ecosystem of the Sharavati River mouth where Honnavar is located. Vikhar refers to the decision to build a port here as a geospatial crime. “When the nod for the port was given, the land was shown to be vacant. But when you go there, people live there,” he says.
At the event, Sandeep and Rajesh also discussed the lack of transparency in the port project and the legal frustrations the community has encountered. “Since 2017, we have been fighting. Whenever we ask for documents, we don’t get that; they keep confusing us,” says Rajesh. Also, every time the community protests against further construction, they end up getting arrested. “This January, in fact, I along with some other protestors, including my wife, were detained at Karwar jail.”
Movie Proof
Sandeep discovered that something was very wrong in Honnavar’s Tonka beach only in December 2022, around Christmas. As someone who spent his childhood in this seaside town, before moving to Belgaum to study and later to Bengaluru for work, his love for his hometown runs deep, and he continues to visit it regularly. That winter, he had taken his six-year-old son to the beach when he saw a newly constructed road and construction debris dumped all across the once-pristine sand. “Eventually, I also got to know that it was the place where the Olive Ridley turtles would come and lay their eggs.”
Sea turtles in India are protected under Schedule 1 of the country’s Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, and their nesting grounds come under CRZ-IA, considered the most ecologically sensitive of all coastal zones. A CRZ notification dated January 18, 2019, issued by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, states that “generally no activities shall be permitted to be carried out in the CRZ-IA areas, with a few exceptions”; creating a port is not one of them.
While the laws may be clear about this, the reality is very different. For instance, a 2021 writ petition filed by the Honnavar Taluk Hasimeenu Vyparastara Sangha in the Karnataka High Court saying that this was an Olive Ridley nesting site was disposed of under rather myopic grounds. While the court, in response to the writ, appointed the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM) to physically verify this fact, the site visit happened in August, nearly five months after the end of the nesting season. By then, the hatchlings had already made their way to the sea and were long gone. “It is very difficult to make people understand the complexity of it (this issue),” says Sandeep, who has been trying to support the community in this fight since then.
One of the ways he sought to do this was to make sure that they got video evidence of turtles nesting on the beaches of Honnavar. In 2023, he shared a post on LinkedIn saying that he was looking for a video creator to help with the conservation of the olive ridley sea turtles. Someone in his network connected Sandeep to Vikas, and the rest was history, as they say. “I said that we should make a documentary,” recalls Vikas, who thought the story deserved more than just reportage or archival footage. “I felt it was an important issue as a filmmaker and someone who believes in preserving the marine ecosystem.”
To learn more, log into oliveridleyseaturtles.honavar.com
