Supplementation of Indian Gharial in protected areas of Madhya Pradesh, India

Summary

The Indian gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), a fish-eating crocodile confined to India and Nepal, had dwindled to fewer than 150 individuals by the late 1960s from hunting, habitat loss, and fishing nets, prompting India's 1975 national crocodile conservation project run with FAO and UNDP support. In Madhya Pradesh, the National Chambal Sanctuary, jointly managed with Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh across the Chambal, Ken, and Son rivers, has run a grow-and-release program since 1978, collecting wild gharial eggs for artificial incubation at the Deori Gharial Rearing Centre and releasing captive-reared juveniles, mostly upstream near Pali, Baroli, and Rameswar Ghat to limit dispersal beyond the sanctuary. Around 2,000 captive-reared gharial have been released into the Chambal River to date, with additional releases into the Ken and Son sanctuaries, alongside captive-reared mugger crocodiles. Financial shortfalls halted the program entirely from 1993 to 2003, when rearing resumed at the Morena centre, but systematic post-release monitoring has been inconsistent throughout, hampered by a lack of scientific input, poor inter-agency coordination between the three states' forest departments, and conflicting land-use pressures across the shared river system. The project explicitly rated itself Partially Successful, citing unscientific release practices, absent post-release monitoring, and a gharial population that continues to decline overall despite the scale of releases carried out.