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.

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........

© The Better India