Twelve men, a newspaper, and the turtles nobody had looked at

It started with a newspaper, which is a better beginning than most conservation stories get.

An autorickshaw driver from Kolavipalam, a coastal hamlet at Iringal north of Kozhikode, read a report about threats to olive ridley turtles. The report was about Gahirmatha in Odisha, most of a coastline away. What he took from it was not outrage about Odisha. It was the realisation that the turtles which came out of the sea onto his own village beach, whose eggs the village dug up and ate, were the same animal.

His name is published as Surendra Babu, and in other sources as Suresh Babu. The group he founded went on to co-author a scientific paper about its own beach, and that paper manages to use both spellings in the same document. We give both and settle nothing.

Theeram

What he founded with eleven others is the Theeram Prakriti Samrakshana Samithi — theeram is simply Malayalam for shore — rendered in English variously as the Shore Nature Protection Committee, the Coastal Ecosystem Protection Committee and the Coastal Environmental Protection Group. Twelve members. Self-funded at the start.

The founding year is usually given as 1992 and sometimes as 1998, and the likeliest reconciliation is that 1998 is when the Forest Department started paying them rather than when they started. Departmental daily-wage support is separately dated to 1997, under a named district forest officer. So: founded 1992, state support from 1997–98.

What they actually did, which is the whole point

They walked the beach at night through the season and read the crawl-tracks in the sand. Where a track led up the beach and back down again, there was a clutch. They either watched the female lay, or found the eggs by probing carefully with a stick — carefully, because the entire exercise fails if you pierce them.

Then they lifted the clutch and immediately reburied it in a hatchery: a fenced enclosure about seven feet high, built of palm thatch, bamboo stakes and old fishing net. They moved the eggs rather than protecting them in place because of stray dogs, jackals and poaching. The 2025 study of this beach puts it flatly — in-situ hatching was not conducted, because of predators.

And they kept records: dates of laying, expected dates of hatching, numbers. Which brings us to the detail that says the most about what this was.

In the first years they did not know how long incubation took. Nobody had told them, and there was nowhere obvious to look it up. So they camped beside the nests to find out. Afterwards, they went and read books on turtle biology.

It spread

Fishermen at Thikkodi, twelve kilometres south, began reporting nests on their own stretch and carrying eggs up to the Kolavipalam hatchery. School programmes started. From 1998 the group planted something in the order of five acres of mangrove along the estuary, and there are reported gains in the nearby fish catch and in groundwater to go with it.

The recognition is thinner than it should be, and we are not going to inflate it. The group received the P. V. Thampy award in November 2000. We searched for others — a Vanamitra, an Earth Heroes, a national award — and could confirm none.

There is also a film. Aamakaar, The Turtle People, seventy-six minutes, made in 2003 by Surabhi Sharma and produced by Sunil Shanbag, which won the Ramsar and MedWet prize at EcoCinema on Rhodes in June 2004 and was placed third best film by the Indian Documentary Producers’ Association. That prize belongs to the film. It is a distinction worth keeping, because film prizes get quietly reassigned to their subjects all the time.

And what it is now

Regular funding ceased around 2021. In February 2026 the group was reported as close to collapse: departmental visits sporadic, and members paying out of their own pockets to feed an injured turtle three times a day. The centre had earlier closed when daily wages for the beach workers were discontinued, at which point it was holding two six-year-old turtles, one with a developmental defect and one missing a flipper to a propeller strike.

Weeks later it was revived, following a Union Budget announcement of turtle centres in Kerala and Karnataka. The group’s joint secretary’s response to that announcement is the most quotable line in thirty years of reporting on this beach, and it is not a happy one: he hoped it would not meet the same fate as earlier unfulfilled declarations.

On 13 April 2026 the Forest Department and Theeram together released 91 hatchlings, the season’s first, from a single clutch of 116 eggs. Ninety-one hatchlings is a good morning. It is also a rounding error against the 5,508 released in a single season at this beach’s peak. Both of those are true.