New clothes were laid out and the aroma of freshly baked poda pitha (a rice flour-coconut-jaggery cake) wafted through the house. It was June 14 and the three-day festival celebrating the menstruation of earth, Raja, had begun. In Nimapur, a coastal village in Odisha’s Kendrapara district, Puspalata Acharya, 40, was on her toes getting her three children ready for the morning festivities. As she hurried them along, she discovered there was no water in the overhead tank. Acharya took her children to the Brahmani river, flowing just 100 metres from their home, for a quick bath. The 541-km-long river, the second largest in Odisha, pours into the Bay of Bengal, running through the mangrove forests of Bhitarkanika National Park.
Playfully, her son Ashutosh, 10, piggybacked on her as they emerged onto the banks. But a few seconds later, Acharya felt her son falling off. As her other children screamed, she turned around to see an estuarine crocodile grab the boy’s leg and drag him into the river. Ashutosh’s corpse was found on the opposite bank of the river. The festivities turned into a nightmare. “I had never imagined I’d lose my son this way. He was just snatched away from my embrace,” says Acharya.
This was the first of six deaths in just two and a half months in Odisha, five in Kendrapara and one in Jajpur districts. Over the last decade, most human-crocodile conflicts have been reported from areas around Bhitarkanika National Park, India’s largest habitation of estuarine or saltwater crocodiles, 150 km east of the State capital, Bhubaneswar. The reptile is considered the largest of the living crocodilians in the world, with males growing up to 20 feet and weighing over 1,000 kg. But the four lakh people living around the national park, on the banks of rivers, worry about crocodile attacks and losing their connection with rivers.
