IWN Original Report — Saturday, 23 May 2026

Ask someone in India to name a turtle and they’ll usually manage one: the Olive Ridley, turning up in news cycles every winter as thousands of them crawl ashore at Gahirmatha or Rushikulya. Maybe two, if they’ve been following the Great Nicobar debate and have heard of the leatherback.

India has close to 30 species of freshwater turtles and tortoises. Seventeen of them carry Schedule I protection under the Wildlife Protection Act — the same schedule that covers tigers.

Most people have never heard of a single one.

Ancient and ignored

Turtles are older than the Himalayas. As a group, they’ve been on Earth for more than 200 million years — surviving the asteroid that finished the dinosaurs, outlasting ice ages, adapting to rivers, coasts, and forest floors across every continent except Antarctica. India, positioned at the confluence of the Indo-Malayan and Palearctic biogeographic zones, ended up with a remarkable slice of that diversity. The Indian softshell in the Gangetic plains. The Indian tent turtle in rivers from the Indus to the Brahmaputra. The Leith’s softshell — one of the world’s largest freshwater turtles — once found across the Krishna, Godavari, and Mahanadi systems.

And the black softshell, declared Extinct in the Wild by the IUCN in 2002, long thought to survive only in temple ponds in Assam and Bangladesh, where priests kept them as sacred animals for centuries without quite realising they were keeping a species alive. The moment it stopped being holy, it disappeared from the rivers. Wild individuals have since been rediscovered in small numbers in Nagaland and along the Brahmaputra — but the species remains Critically Endangered, and its fragile recovery owes more to religious tradition than to anything the state did.

What’s killing them

Freshwater turtles in India face a set of pressures that wildlife discourse rarely bothers to name. Sand mining strips nesting banks. Fishing nets take them as bycatch — turtles breathe air; they drown. Dams alter river temperature and flow, disrupting the thermal cues that trigger nesting. And then there is the trade.

TRAFFIC‘s monitoring data identified a minimum of 1,11,310 tortoises and freshwater turtles in illegal trade in India over a ten-year period. Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal are the two largest trafficking hotspots. The routes lead to meat markets in parts of Southeast Asia and China, the exotic pet trade in Europe and North America, and local consumption within India itself. The Indian star tortoise — protected under Schedule IV of the Wildlife Protection Act but trafficked relentlessly — has been seized at airports with enough frequency that most Indians have encountered it only in trafficking headlines. This week, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence recovered Malabar giant squirrels and star tortoises near Pune railway station. The routes are well-worn.

The Chambal exception

There is one stretch of river where freshwater turtle conservation has actually worked, and it’s the same one that gave India the gharial. The Chambal — running through Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh — is one of India’s least-dammed, least-encroached major rivers. Its ravine terrain, which made it famous for dacoits, also kept development away. The result is one of the healthiest river ecosystems in the subcontinent.

Red-crowned roofed turtles, Indian softshells, Indian peacock softshells — the Chambal holds them all. Three of the Chambal’s turtle species are Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. In Prayagraj, a 30-km stretch has been designated a turtle sanctuary. Uttar Pradesh has established conservation centres in Kukrail, Sarnath, and Etawah. Real interventions, even if underfunded relative to what they’re protecting.

The sea turtle question

India’s five sea turtle species — Olive Ridley, Green, Hawksbill, Loggerhead, and Leatherback — occupy the more visible end of the spectrum, though “visible” is relative. The Olive Ridley’s mass nesting events at Gahirmatha in Odisha and Rushikulya attract cameras every February and March. The leatherback nests in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands — and at Galathea Bay, Great Nicobar, in numbers that have no parallel on Indian shores. What happens to that beach in the years ahead is one of India’s defining conservation questions right now.

The others — Green, Hawksbill, Loggerhead — nest in smaller numbers along India’s coasts, largely undocumented, rarely counted.

A 200-million-year head start, no guarantee

Turtles are built for the long game. Slow metabolism. Lifespans that stretch past a century. The ability to go months without food. By almost any biological measure, they should be fine.

What they weren’t built for is the speed at which rivers are mined, nets strung, and sandbanks scraped away in a single season.

India’s freshwater turtles and tortoises have seventeen species under the highest legal protection available under Indian law — and five sea turtle species that are all protected under Schedule I. Most are declining. Almost none are famous. That gap — between the protection on paper and the attention in practice — is where they are being lost.

Sources: TRAFFIC India · Wildlife Crime Control Bureau · Turtle Survival Alliance India · Zoological Survey of India