Are Gharials Endangered? Decline and Recovery in India

How endangered are gharials?

The IUCN Red List has classed the gharial as Critically Endangered since 2007. The species is also listed on Appendix I of CITES, which bans international commercial trade, and it has the highest level of legal protection in India and Nepal.

The IUCN’s 2019 assessment estimated that about 650 mature adults remain in the wild, spread across a handful of river systems. Surveys that count all ages give higher totals, and estimates vary with the method used, but the overall picture is clear: a species that once ranged across the great rivers of South Asia now survives in a small fraction of that area.

The 20th-century crash

In 1946, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 gharials lived in the rivers of the northern Indian subcontinent. Over the following decades they were hunted for their skins and as trophies, killed by fishermen and caught in fishing nets, while their eggs were collected for food and folk medicine. By the mid-1970s, fewer than 200 were thought to survive, in perhaps 2 percent of their former range.

Between 1946 and 2006, the population fell by an estimated 96 to 98 percent. Gharials disappeared from the Indus in Pakistan, from Bhutan and Myanmar, and from many Indian rivers. Then, after a period of recovery, numbers fell again: the number of breeding adults dropped from an estimated 436 in 1997 to fewer than 250 by 2006, a decline of more than half in under a decade. That second drop triggered the Critically Endangered listing.

Why gharials are still in trouble

Hunting is no longer the main problem. Today’s threats come mostly from the way people use rivers:

• Dams, barrages and water extraction change river flows, flood some stretches and leave others too shallow.
• Sand mining and farming on riverbanks destroy the sandbanks gharials need for basking and nesting.
• Gill nets trap and drown gharials, and overfishing reduces their food.
• Pollution may play a role: between December 2007 and March 2008, more than 100 gharials died in the Chambal River, and tests pointed to toxic metals and parasites.

Because gharials rarely travel overland, they cannot easily move to a new river when theirs is damaged, which makes habitat loss especially dangerous.

Captive breeding and release

In 1975, India launched a national crocodile conservation project with support from the United Nations, and in 1978 Nepal began collecting gharial eggs at the Gharial Conservation and Breeding Center in Chitwan National Park. The method was simple: collect eggs from the wild, hatch them safely, raise the young for two to three years until they were about 1 m (3.3 ft) long, and release them into protected rivers.

More than 5,000 gharials were released into Indian rivers between the early 1980s and 2006, and Nepal released more than 1,300 into the Narayani-Rapti river system between 1981 and 2018. These releases helped keep several populations alive, but survival was often low. Many animals were released into disturbed rivers, at the wrong time of year or at an age when they struggled to adapt. Experts now recommend leaving more wild nests in place and putting more effort into protecting habitat.

Where gharials survive today

The stronghold is the National Chambal Sanctuary, a protected stretch of the Chambal River shared by Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Recent surveys there have counted well over 1,000 gharials of all ages and hundreds of nests a year. Smaller breeding populations live in the Girwa River in Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary, the Gandak River, the Son River and the Ramganga in Corbett National Park, and in Nepal’s Chitwan and Bardiya National Parks.

There is also surprising news from Pakistan, where gharials had been considered lost. In 2023, gharials were reported on the Sutlej River in Punjab, and part of the river was declared a gharial sanctuary.

Signs of recovery

There are real reasons for hope. In the Chambal, the number of nests recorded rose from about 400 in 2017 to nearly 500 in 2019. On the Girwa River, clearing overgrown vegetation from nesting banks and adding fresh sand created better nesting sites, and the number of nests on that stretch rose from 25 in 2018 to 36 in 2020. In the Gandak River, the number of gharials counted grew from 15 in 2010 to 54 in 2015, most of them born in the wild.

Gharials also have a growing role in tourism and education. Boat trips in the Chambal and in Nepal’s national parks let visitors see them in the wild, and several zoos in Europe and North America keep and breed gharials. For more on what they need from their rivers, see what do gharials eat?

What still needs to happen

Conservationists agree that releasing young gharials is not enough on its own. The species needs rivers with enough water, undisturbed sandbanks for nesting and basking, fishing methods that do not drown gharials, and the support of the people who live along those rivers. Because males take about 15 years to mature, recovery will be slow, and the gharial will remain Critically Endangered for years to come even if its numbers keep rising.