A little more than 33 years ago, sometime in early 1988, I was grinding through my Masters degree in Zoology at the Madras Christian College. The big news was that the Tamilnadu Forest Department was planning to shut down all five of their Olive Ridley Sea Turtle hatcheries on the Chennai (then Madras) coast. For about five years, most nests, with anything from 50-200 eggs each, were collected by Forest Department staff and relocated at the nearest hatchery.

Adding to the primary threat of an increasingly populated and changing nesting habitat was the mutating perspectives of an emerging generation of coastal dwellers. To give you an example, there was a time when we found a freshly dead sea turtle female on the beach. She had been cut open cleanly along her side. We were used to seeing washed up adults with propeller cuts and found this would quite strange. The next night, asking in the village, we found to our absolute horror that two young fishing village boys had disturbed her when she came ashore. They stopped her from retreating back to the sea, flipped her over and cut her open to get at the eggs, driven unfortunately by the fact that the eggs had a certain market value. They had been unable to sell the eggs and we actually did recover, if I remember right, about 50-55 eggs from just in front of one of the fishing village huts. I remember that the elders in the village were as shocked as I was. I still find this hard to believe. But humanity’s perversions don’t surprise me anymore.

Now, add to this unholy mess, the fact that there were now experienced ex-departmental staff, without a livelihood. A few of these guys; I remember three of them, continued doing what they did best. Except that now they sold to the local restaurants and hole-in-the-wall dives. The eggs have a musky sort of taste and and as I have heard, accompanied, with a bit of chilly powder thrown in, the locally distilled arrack as a side dish. The most ardent and intuitive among them was an aptly named ghost called Mayavan.

After five years with some protection, it ended with ex-staff de-franchised and skilled (at finding nests) at a limbo, a reasonable market for the eggs, changing local attitudes, marauding packs of village dogs and increased disorienting (to the hatchlings) lights from the city. That familiar stretch of beach was headed towards OPEN SEASON for all things TURTLE !

In early 1988, Sudhakar Muthyala, Arif Razak & I began to put together a plan to try and build a hatchery of our own and so was born the story of SSTCN.

The story about the struggle financial and otherwise, to bring it into existence and the lessons learnt will follow.