IWN Daily Digest — Friday, 31 July 2026
A gharial went missing in Rajasthan’s canal network in March. It took two forest departments, three sightings and five months of patient tracking to bring it home.
The gharial, a critically endangered fish-eating crocodilian, was first reported in the Indira Gandhi Canal on 14 March, when Rajasthan‘s Chief Wildlife Warden rang his counterpart in Punjab after a sighting near Ganganagar district a day earlier. Forest teams tracked the animal along roughly 25 kilometres of canal, but high water and strong currents from the Rabi irrigation season ruled out an immediate rescue.
Three Sightings
The gharial resurfaced near the Bikaner-Ganganagar border on 5 May, then further downstream in the canal’s Stage-II stretch towards the end of June. Both times, the currents were judged too dangerous for a safe capture.
It finally ran out of canal on 27 July, caught in the Mohangarh Minor near Jaisalmer once water levels eased. Officials examined it at a Rajasthan forest facility in Mohangarh before moving it onward, following procedures under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and IUCN guidelines for handling crocodilians.
Beas Bound
The gharial — more than 12 feet long — is now at Chhatbir Zoo for a health check and acclimatisation, ahead of a planned release into the Beas River Conservation Reserve. Punjab has been building a case for that stretch of river. Ninety-four juvenile gharials have already gone into the reserve under a programme run by the Punjab Forest Department with technical support from WWF-India, and monitoring so far shows encouraging signs of survival in the Beas-Harike-Sutlej system.
Gharials take years to reach breeding age, so a wild population needs adults as much as juveniles. Whether this one settles into its stretch of the Beas is a question for the next round of monitoring reports.
Sources: The Tribune
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