India's Indian Softshell Turtle Is One of the Most Endangered Freshwater Reptiles in Its Own Rivers

The Indian softshell turtle, Nilssonia gangetica, can grow to over 70 centimetres and weigh close to 25 kilograms. Its shell is not the hard dome most people picture. It is a flattened, leathery pad, cartilaginous rather than bony, that lets the animal slip through fast-moving currents with almost no drag. The neck is long and tubular, tipped with a fleshy, pig-like snout that works as a natural snorkel. The turtle breathes by pushing its snout just above the surface, often without breaking the waterline visibly. This design has barely changed across geological time. The softshell lineage is ancient, and Nilssonia gangetica is one of its most specialised products.
What makes this species biologically unusual beyond its shell is its cloacal bursae, sac-like structures near the tail that absorb dissolved oxygen directly from the water. In effect, the turtle can "breathe" through its rear end while resting submerged for hours. A 2002 study published in the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology confirmed that cutaneous respiration of this kind contributes meaningfully to oxygen uptake in softshell turtles during prolonged submersion. It is one of the reasons Nilssonia gangetica can stay hidden on the riverbed for long stretches, making it almost invisible to casual observers, and almost impossible to census accurately.The species is distributed across the Ganga, Indus, Mahanadi, and Brahmaputra river systems, with the Ganga basin historically holding the densest populations. It prefers deep, sandy-bottomed stretches with sandbars for nesting. Females crawl onto exposed sandbars between April and June to lay clutches of 20 to 180 eggs, burying them just below the surface where solar heat does the incubation work.
Those sandbars are disappearing. Commercial sand mining in the Ganga and its tributaries has stripped the nesting substrate that the species depends on. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, stretches of the Ganga that once had broad, stable sandbars now show eroded, unstable banks that shift before a clutch can hatch. Dam construction compounds this: barrages alter flow velocity and sediment deposition, which changes where sandbars form and how long they persist. The Farakka Barrage in West Bengal, operational since 1975, has altered the lower Ganga's sediment dynamics significantly, an effect documented by the Central Water Commission and multiple river ecologists over the following decades.The Indian softshell turtle is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, but field surveys by the Wildlife Institute of India and the Turtle Survival Alliance have repeatedly found that wild population numbers are far lower than that classification implies. The species is heavily targeted by poachers for its meat, which is consumed locally and traded across state lines. Its eggs are collected from nesting sandbars before they can hatch. Fishermen using gill nets in the Ganga frequently catch softshells as bycatch; the turtles drown when they cannot surface to breathe.
The wildlife trade pressure is not incidental. Nilssonia gangetica appears in seizure records from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal with regularity. Because the animal is so cryptic in the water, enforcement is difficult: by the time a population decline becomes measurable, the damage is already years old.The Gharial Ecological Training Centre at Kukrail in Lucknow, run by the Uttar Pradesh Forest Department, has included softshell turtle head-starting in its programme alongside gharial and mugger crocodile work. Hatchlings are raised in protected conditions for their first vulnerable months, then released into the Ganga. The National Chambal Sanctuary, which spans Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh, offers some of the most intact riverine habitat remaining in northern India and supports a population of Nilssonia gangetica alongside the critically endangered gharial.

The Turtle Survival Alliance India Programme has worked with local fishing communities in the Ganga basin to reduce bycatch mortality, providing modified nets and running awareness programmes in riparian villages. These are not large-scale interventions. They are holding actions in a system that is still losing ground.
The legal framework exists: Nilssonia gangetica is listed under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act 1972, giving it the highest level of protection under Indian law. The gap between legal protection and field reality is where the species is being lost.Softshell turtles are scavengers and carnivores. In the Ganga, Nilssonia gangetica feeds on fish, molluscs, frogs, and carrion. Its role as a scavenger is the one that matters most ecologically: it consumes decomposing organic matter, including animal carcasses, that would otherwise drive bacterial blooms and oxygen depletion in the water column. The Ganga has historically received enormous volumes of organic waste, and the river's macro-scavengers, turtles, gharials, Gangetic dolphins, have functioned as a biological filtration system. Remove the turtles, and the load on the river's chemistry increases.

This is not theoretical. The Ganga Action Plan, launched in 1985, identified the river's declining scavenger populations as a factor in its deteriorating water quality. Turtle conservation was explicitly included in early phases of the plan, with release programmes conducted in Varanasi. Those programmes were not sustained at scale.
The Indian softshell turtle is not a charismatic species in the way a tiger or an elephant draws public attention. It does not appear in temple iconography. It does not feature in wildlife documentaries with the frequency its situation warrants. The river it lives in is sacred to hundreds of millions of people, and that same river, in its current state, can no longer support the animal that has cleaned it for millennia. The turtle's survival and the river's health are the same problem, measured by different instruments.