Looking Back: Turtles in India Making a Comeback

0:01Today on State of the World, turtles in India making a comeback.

0:09You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. As we say goodbye to 2025, our international reporters are looking back at some of the stories they covered in the last year. NPR's Dia Hadid is based in India and she joins me. Dia, what was your most memorable story of the last year? Oh, Greg, my most memorable story would be the Vallas Turtle Festival. I was excited by the name and I began digging around because what on earth is a turtle festival? And then I found out through reporting that there's a species of turtle called the olive ridley.

0:49They're olive, they're small, and they inhabit a band of water across the equator. So you can find them in Mexico, you can find them in India. But conservationists had thought that they had disappeared from the West Indian coast until about 20 years ago, a person walking on the beach found a turtle eggshell and realised that no, maybe some are still coming back to nest. Once there was evidence, it really kicked in hard work by conservationists to stop development on the beach to allow the turtles to come back. And so many have come back that this conservationist in the village of Veles was able to create this festival that would put money into the pockets of residents as a way of incentivising the conservation.

1:44Because for two months every year, they invite tourists to the village to watch these newly hatched babies. They lurch, they're blind, They flap about. They're extremely cute, obviously. And people watch them toddle into the scene. Well, let's take a listen to your report from the Veles Festival from April of 2025. Tourist Watch volunteers gather newly hatched turtles from inside a hatchery. It's like an animal pen on the sand. These turtle eggs had been collected a few weeks ago from the Vela shore, from turtle nests, that is, a hole dug by a female olive riddley with her flippers where she lays dozens of eggs inside.

2:28The volunteers dug them out and put them in this hatchery to protect them from predators like dogs and gulls. Volunteers plop the wriggly little hatchlings onto the sand. Kids squeal as the hatchlings lurch towards the sea. The babies reach the frothy, salty fringe. Waves pull them in. Tourists clap. The Vedas Turtle Festival has run for about a decade. It's the brainchild of local Mohan Upadhyay. We meet in his garden. I see you have a tattoo on your arm that says, save me. A turtle tattoo. It's having two meanings. If people will save me, then I will save him. Save humans from ecological destruction.

3:13He says conservationists thought Olive Ridley's disappeared from these parts in the 90s for the same reasons that their populations were collapsing across India over the decades, swept up in fishing nets, butchered for their leather and meat, their eggs poached. But Upadhyay says in the early aughts, a worker from a local nature charity stumbled onto a turtle eggshell on the Venice shore. Pretty soon, Upadhyay was helping the charity identify turtle nesting sites. I was in love with sea turtles. He convinced villagers to ban seaside construction to protect the nesting sites because at least some of the surviving females born on this beach will return to it to lay their own eggs.

3:55It's not clear why olive ridley turtles do that, but it's why protecting their nesting sites is so key to protecting the species. Upadhyay created incentives for locals to support his efforts, like creating the Veras Turtle Festival, which brings tourists and their money to town. Now? There are two villages who are replicating this model. Since they began work, Upadhyay says they've gone from binding sporadic turtle nests to counting about 70 over the last nesting season. Patchwork efforts like this around the country have staved off an expected collapse in olive ridley numbers. Karatek Shankar is one of India's preeminent experts on olive ridley turtles.

4:36He says in just one state in India last year, conservationists counted. About a million nests. which is crazy high. A million turtle nests. Seems to me that a lot of riddly turtles have bounced back quite substantially. But still, they are designated globally as threatened, and they're still facing dangers in India. Much of the effort, though, to protect India's sea turtles can be traced back to one man, Satesh Bhaskar. A documentary was made about him last year called The Turtle Walker. Bhaskar earned the name after he spent years walking some 2 ,500 miles across India's shorelines to map turtle habitats.

5:18He says in the documentary, I couldn't stop thinking about these very mysterious animals. The data that Bhaskar produced has guided conservationists for decades. Back in the village of Vedas, Mohan Upadhyay, who created the Turtle Festival, says of Satish Bhaskar, the turtle walker. He's actually God. He says it's not just the data Bhaskar produced, it's the awe he inspired for sea turtles. And Upadhyay hopes that among the tourists who cheer on the baby turtles crawling into the sea during the Vedas Turtle Festival, who'll find new people who have that all for sea turtles and who'll protect them for another generation.

6:07That was Dia Hadid reporting in April of 2025.

6:16That's the State of the World from NPR. Happy holidays and thanks for listening.