VELAS, India — At daybreak, visitors at the Velas Turtle Festival cheer as palm-sized olive ridley hatchlings, flippers flapping, lurch toward the sea. Volunteers collected eggs from nests on the shore and moved them into a netted hatchery to protect them from predators. When the babies emerge, they’re released under supervision so gulls and dogs don’t pick them off as they crawl into the water.
Even with those protections, survival is slim: roughly one in 1,000 olive ridleys ever reaches maturity. The species is listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and faces long-standing threats across its tropical range — bycatch in fishing nets, large-scale slaughter for meat and leather, egg poaching and coastal development. Conservationists feared dramatic population collapses in India in past decades.
But there are hopeful signs. Kartik Shanker, a leading Indian sea turtle expert, says two decades ago conservationists counted about 100,000 nests across India. After protections were put in place, last winter’s nesting season saw roughly a million nests, a dramatic rebound. Measures that helped include seasonal fishing bans, protected coastal zones and community-driven projects such as the Velas Turtle Festival.
The festival, founded by Mohan Upadhye, grew out of an early 2000s discovery of a turtle eggshell near Velas. Upadhye organized hatcheries, convinced the local council to ban seaside construction to protect nesting sites and started the festival to incentivize conservation. Villagers are paid modestly to keep beaches clean and to protect nests. The event attracts tourists who often stay with residents during the two-month hatching season beginning in April, bringing income and raising awareness.
Volunteers use hatcheries and protective baskets over nests to reduce predation. The approach acknowledges that many turtles will still die at sea, but improving early survival increases the odds some will live to reproduce. Olive ridleys are unusual in sometimes nesting en masse in an arribada — synchronous, large-scale nesting events — making protection of specific beaches especially important since females often return to the same sites to lay eggs.
Community pride and local leadership have played major roles. Upadhye sports a turtle tattoo and talks about passing the conservation torch to future generations. Festival manager Virendra Ramesh Patel notes that attitudes have shifted: his grandparents once poached eggs for special omelettes; now villagers protect nests for conservation and eco-tourism income. The festival’s success reflects a broader lineage of turtle conservationists in India, tracing back to Satish Bhaskar, nicknamed the “Turtle Walker” for walking thousands of miles along coasts to study turtles and build a data baseline. A documentary, Turtle Walker, was released this year.
Despite the rebound, risks persist. In January, hundreds of olive ridleys washed up dead near Chennai, apparently suffocated in fishing nets used by illegal trawlers. Plastic pollution poses newer dangers: turtles confuse floating plastic for jellyfish and ingest it. Shanker worries that visible recovery could prompt pressure to roll back protections, with developers arguing the turtles are no longer endangered and seeking to build ports or other infrastructure on nesting beaches.
He and others advocate working with local communities so they benefit from conservation, through eco-tourism or carefully regulated, sustainable use where appropriate. Upadhye and festival organizers emphasize awareness — hoping visitors who cheer for hatchlings will carry that concern home. “This is the time that we have to make future generations aware,” Upadhye says. “We have to fight.”
Velas offers a model of patchwork but effective conservation: community engagement, protected nesting sites, seasonal restrictions on fishing and active nest protection. Those measures helped reverse a decline that once seemed likely to continue. Still, mass mortality events, illegal fishing, pollution and the threat of development show that the recovery remains fragile. Continued protections, enforcement against illegal trawling and efforts to reduce ocean plastic will be needed to ensure olive ridleys keep rebounding rather than slipping back toward peril.