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This is an archive article published on April 24, 2014

Olive Ridley saviour Chandrasekhar Kar dies

Kar was 58, and retired senior research officer from the state forest and wildlife department in February.

The man instrumental in putting the state on the world map of Olive Ridley turtles and who spent most part of his life studying marine turtles in Gahirmatha on Orissa coast died on Monday night. The passing away of conservationist Chandrasekhar Kar is a huge loss to wildlife conservation, said forest officials and colleagues.

“The untimely death of Kar is a great loss to the wildlife department. He worked a lot for conservation of marine turtles,” said DFO, Bhitarkanika National Park, Kedar Kumar Swain.

Kar was 58, and retired senior research officer from the state forest and wildlife department in February.

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In 1979, his presentation at the first world conference on sea turtles in Washington put Orissa on the turtle map.

Along with H R Bustard, FAO consultant, he brought the Olive Ridley mass nesting site near Devi river mouth in Puri to the notice of the world and turned it into a conservation spot. Kar, started tagging turtles in the 80s to study their migration. In 2001, he started tracking turtles through satellite telemetry and repeated the experiment in 2007. He spent about four decades researching turtles at Gahirmatha.
Retired senior research officer L A K Singh said, “No one in India thought about or fought for Ridleys as passionately as Kar.”

Kar played a key role in preventing smuggling of turtles to fish markets in Kolkata in the 1970s.

“Gahirmatha rookery was discovered for conservation by Dr Bustard but Kar stood behind Chief Wildlife Wardens and sweated in the office, the secretariat, the High Power Committees and the High Court to ensure Gahirmatha Marine National Park was notified and sustained,” Singh wrote in his blog.

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IFS officer Sanjiv Chaddha, who co-authored Bhitarkanika, The Myth and Reality with Kar, said bulk of information on Indian sea turtles originated from Orissa because of Kar.

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