The Gharial Fell to Fewer Than 200 Animals Worldwide in 1974, Reached 1,857 in the Chambal by 2019, Lost 113 in the Winter of 2007 to 2008, and Is Still Critically Endangered

In 1974 a survey found fewer than 200 gharial left in the world, according to the action plan the IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group published in 2010. The latest peer-reviewed count in the National Chambal Sanctuary, by Wildlife Institute of India (WII) researchers, is 1,857 animals in 2019. The species is still listed as Critically Endangered, and the Supreme Court is now supervising action on sand mining inside the sanctuary.

The gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) is a fish-eating crocodilian with a very long, narrow snout. Adult males grow a bulb at its tip that resembles an Indian pot called a ghara, which is where the name comes from, the Crocodile Specialist Group says.

A survey in 1974 and a project in 1975

Gharial once lived in the Indus, Ganga, Mahanadi and Brahmaputra systems. The Crocodile Specialist Group plan says surveys in the 1970s found breeding populations in only three places: the Chambal, Katarniaghat in Uttar Pradesh and Chitwan in Nepal. Janaki Lenin, writing in Seminar in 2007, dates the survey to 1973 and puts the count near 200 in India and Nepal together.

The Government of India launched Project Crocodile in 1975 with support from the United Nations Development Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization, Lenin records. The WII paper dates the launch to 1975 as well. Its method was head-starting. Workers collected eggs, reared the hatchlings in captivity until they were big enough to survive (the plan says over a metre, Lenin says about 1.2 metres after three to four years) and then released them into rivers.

Lenin reports about 12,000 eggs collected over 30 years. The WII paper says more than 5,000 gharial were released over four decades, more than 3,500 of them into the Chambal and Girwa rivers, and that releases stopped in the mid-1990s after the population recovered.

The Chambal count from 1979 to 2019

The WII paper, by Surya Prasad Sharma, Suyash Katdare, Ruchi Badola and Syed Ainul Hussain, lays out the sanctuary’s counts. There were 107 animals in 1979, 605 in 1985, 820 in 1988 and 1,065 in the early 1990s. Nests rose from 13 in 1979 to 52 in 1988.

Then the numbers fell. The paper says the population dwindled to fewer than 200 individuals by the early 2000s and that the reasons for the late-1990s decline remain unclear. The Crocodile Specialist Group plan gives the range-wide picture: surveys in 1997 and 1998 found about 1,675 gharial in India and Nepal, 436 of them adults, and surveys in 2006 found fewer than 200 breeding adults and about 834 animals in total. The plan’s figure is for breeding adults across the whole range. The paper’s sentence says only “individuals” and gives no breakdown by age.

The recovery since then is the one the WII team measured directly. Boat-based counts in February and March gave 1,512 gharial in 2017, 1,673 in 2018 and 1,857 in 2019, a growth of about 3.2 percent a year. Nests went from 402 in 2017 to 486 in 2019, and animals longer than 3 metres, which the paper counts as adults, went from 919 to 1,116. The paper puts the Chambal’s share at about 80 percent of the world’s gharial.

Those adult numbers sit above the figure a 2025 paper in Reptiles & Amphibians gives for the species: about 650 mature adults in the wild, with a range of 300 to 900, and 77 percent of them in the Chambal sanctuary, citing the 2019 Red List assessment by Lang, Chowfin and Ross. We could not retrieve the Red List page itself, so we cannot say how it defines mature animals or why the two figures differ.

The counts since 2019 do not agree

Four sets of figures have been published since, and the versions we could open give no full method for any of them.

The WII ran boat surveys on 22 Ganga-basin rivers from November 2020 to March 2023. Mongabay India reports 3,037 gharial in total. India’s Endangered, summarising the same survey, gives 2,097 for the Chambal, 463 for the Ghaghara and 158 for the Girwa. We could not open the WII report, so both numbers are second-hand.

The Better India reported on 10 July 2025, citing a Times of India interview, that the sanctuary’s Uttar Pradesh stretch recorded 2,026 gharial in 2025 against 1,880 in 2024. It quotes the wildlife warden, K C Shekhar, saying some animals stay under water during the count, so the true number may be higher. Amar Ujala, on 22 May 2025, quoted Uday Pratap Singh, a forest ranger at Bah, giving 2,456 for the Chambal after 44 years of conservation. A 2021 report by the Zoological Society of London’s EDGE of Existence programme gives the Chambal a range of 1,709 to 1,880 for the 2021 count, and the Better India’s figure for 2024 equals the top of that range.

We found no release from the three state forest departments with a joint sanctuary total, so these figures cannot be tied to one area or one method. In March 2008 Lang, working with WWF-India staff, found that static counts at two sites showed boat surveys undercounting the gharial present by 25 to 40 percent. Method decides what a count means, and our piece on how India counts its tigers and lions shows how different methods return a single figure or a range.

113 dead in one winter, and no named poison

On 8 December 2007, Rajeev Chauhan of the Society for Conservation of Nature, an Etawah group, reported several dead gharial on the lower Chambal. The Whitaker, Basu and Huchzermeyer account in the Crocodile Specialist Group Newsletter says the toll reached 90 by 25 January 2008, all inside a 40 km stretch near the Yamuna confluence, and 100 by mid-February. The Crocodile Specialist Group plan settles on 113 sub-adult and adult animals, about 60 percent of the sub-adults in the lower Chambal.

Early tests found high lead and cadmium in tissue, stomach ulcers and protozoan parasites, and these were first blamed. Brian Stacy, one of four veterinarians the Crocodile Specialist Group sent to India, confirmed gout on the organs and in the joints on 25 January and doubted that parasites were the cause. At a meeting at Jiwaji University in Gwalior on 5 February, the veterinarians concluded that the animals died of kidney failure from a toxic insult. The newsletter says the toxin and its source were still a mystery in March.

Most of the dead were between 1.6 and 3.5 metres long; juveniles and the largest adults were spared. The newsletter floated a theory that fish from the Yamuna, which is heavily polluted, carried the toxin up the Chambal, and it named the introduced tilapia as a possible carrier, while noting that gharial at the Madras Crocodile Bank had eaten tilapia for three decades without harm.

A radio-tracking study, the Gharial Ecology Project, began in 2008 under Romulus Whitaker, Dhruva Jyoti Basu and Jeffrey Lang. ThePrint reported in May 2024 that the team tagged 30 gharial and found that sub-adults move little, so the toxin must have come from within about 15 km of where the bodies lay. That account does not name the poison.

What the Red List says

The Crocodile Specialist Group plan gives the 2009 Red List entry, last assessed in 2007, as Critically Endangered on two criteria: a decline of at least 80 percent over three generations, and fewer than 250 breeding adults. It put the fall at more than 80 percent since the 1940s. The Zoological Society’s 2021 blueprint says the later assessment, by Lang and co-authors in 2019, lists the species under criteria A2bce. The Reptiles & Amphibians paper says gharial numbers fell by more than 80 percent across the former range, and Mongabay India says more than 94 percent since the 1950s; the two sources start from different baselines.

The plan says restocking has generally failed to establish viable populations in new places. Releases continue anyway. West Bengal’s forest directorate and WWF-India released 37 captive-bred juveniles into the Ganga at Murshidabad on 24 February 2024, and the Reptiles & Amphibians paper says three were lost to ghost nets, abandoned fishing nets, within 15 days. Mongabay India reported on 1 April 2026 that 53 gharial had been released the month before at Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Captive-bred releases are also under way for the Great Indian Bustard, and the Supreme Court ordered a second population of Gir’s Asiatic lions started at Kuno in 2013, with disease in a single population as its central worry.

Nets, sand and water

The Crocodile Specialist Group plan lists hunting for skins, killing by fishermen, egg collection and accidental drowning in nets among the causes of the long decline. It says entangled animals are sometimes killed or have their snouts cut off by fishermen. The WII paper names sand mining, deaths in fishing nets, reduced river flow and a rapidly growing mugger population, a broader-snouted native crocodile, as current threats. The Better India’s account, citing divisional forest officer Chandni Singh, counted 869 muggers in 2025, up from 742 in 2024.

Gharial nest on exposed sandbanks and live in flowing rivers with deep pools, the plan says, which is why both sand mining and river flow matter. The Oryx paper on the Ghaghara names the Girijapuri and Sharda Nagar barrages as regulating flow there and says dams, water extraction and diversion have fragmented and isolated populations. For the pollution side that the Yamuna theory raised, see our Namami Gange results.

The Supreme Court takes up sand mining in 2026

The Supreme Court registered a suo motu writ petition on 13 March 2026, after news reports of illegal sand mining in the sanctuary. Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta heard it. Their order of 20 March said officials of the forest, mining and water resources departments and the police in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh could be held vicariously liable for aiding and abetting habitat destruction through inaction. The order also noted reports that Rajasthan had denotified 732 hectares (about 7.3 sq km) of the sanctuary in a boundary exercise. On 2 April the court stayed Rajasthan’s notification of 23 December 2025.

The order of 17 April records an application saying a forest guard, Harikesh Gurjar, was killed on 8 April in Morena when a tractor-trolley carrying illegally mined sand ran him over, and that another, Jitendra Singh Shekhawat, died on 9 January in Dholpur after a similar incident. It also records a statement filed on behalf of Madhya Pradesh before the National Green Tribunal that forest staff lack the weapons to deal with the sand mafia. The court ordered CCTV on sand routes, GPS trackers on mining vehicles in Morena and Dholpur on a pilot basis, joint police and forest patrols, and environmental compensation from violators, and warned it could deploy paramilitary forces or ban sand mining in the two states.

On 26 May the bench told the three states to make CCTV and control centres work within six months and to fill vacant forest guard posts within a year, IANS reported. It listed the main matter for 22 July 2026, and 26 May is the latest order we could retrieve.