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Marine Turtle Newsletter 25:1, © 1983

Editorial

N. Mrosovsky

The mass nesting of olive ridleys along the east coast of India has been much in the news lately. Following reports of the slaughter of large numbers of turtles at Digha (Bobb, D. 1982, India Today, 31, 64-65), a letter-writing campaign was launched through the Marine Turtle Newsletter (1982, 23, 1-2). The matter was taken up in the N.Y. Times, the Times (London), the Times of India and the Toronto Globe and Mail; it has been discussed on BBC radio, a TV network in Belgium and probably elsewhere. In the Netherlands the journal Lacerta has carried the campaign forward. Your editor has received copies of 59 letters written to the Prime Minister of India, but far more than this number were sent. According to a reliable source 200-300 letters, definitely more than 200, were received in India.

Is all this doing any good? There is always the danger that outsiders may do more harm than good when they try to intervene in situations whose complexity they may not fully understand. Yet it is clear both from the replies received from Prime Minister Gandhi and government officials and from the articles from India printed below in this issue, that there is concern there about the situation. Although there seems little intention at present of instituting some controlled egg harvest, as suggested in many of the letters, protective measures have been taken, patrols strengthened, hatchery work supported and the state authorities asked to be vigilant. But correlation should not be confused with cause. Many of these measures were set in motion before the present publicity. So when I spoke recently with Mr. Samar Singh, Director of Wildlife Preservation, in the Department of Environment, India, I asked him directly, "Has the letter writing been helpful?". He replied thoughtfully, cautiously, "Yes", he said, "it has strengthened our hand". That seems a fair assessment.

We feel confident that the expression of international concern, offered in good faith by people familiar with the decline of turtles in other parts of the world, has been sympathetically received in India. The olive ridleys nesting in India are among the world's largest populations of sea turtles. We hope the Indian authorities will have more success in conserving their turtles than has been the case in the past in some other countries. There still remains much to be done.