By: Dr. Zeeshan Qasim
There is a story told along the katcha lands near Chashma, in the voice old fishermen use when they want a child to sit still and listen. A dolphin once lived in every bend of the Sindhu, the story goes, until the river grew narrow and frightened and the dolphin had to choose which bend to keep. It chose the ones nobody was watching. That is why, the old men say, you almost never see the Bhulan anymore. Not because it left. Because it learned, the way everything in the Derajat eventually learns, that being seen carries a cost.
It is a fisherman’s fable, not a scientific one, and it should be treated as such. But it gets something right that thirty years of surveys have struggled to put into a policy paper. The Indus River dolphin is not vanishing. It is going unwatched. And in a country where attention decides what survives, that may turn out to be the more dangerous condition.
The Bhulan, known to science as Platanista minor, is one of only a handful of river dolphin species left on earth, and among the rarest mammals anywhere. It is functionally blind, navigating the silt-thick waters of the Mighty Indus through echolocation rather than sight, which is itself the origin of its Seraiki name. It once ranged across nearly the full length of the river system. Barrages, irrigation offtakes and a river carved into disconnected segments have reduced that range to a fraction of what it was, stranding populations in stretches separated by concrete it cannot cross. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists it as Endangered. WWF-Pakistan, which has run the country’s most serious effort to save it since 1992, calls it the second most endangered freshwater dolphin on the planet.
And yet the numbers, where they exist, tell a story Pakistan rarely bothers to tell about itself, and it is a story of recovery, not just retreat. WWF’s first proper count in 2001 found around 1,200 dolphins. By 2006 the estimate had climbed to roughly 1,550. By 2011, close to 1,665. By 2017, nearly 1,987. Today the working figure sits near 2,000, achieved through community fishing agreements, rescue operations pulling stranded dolphins out of irrigation canals, and years of quiet, unglamorous conservation work that produced no viral moment and, as a result, almost no public memory.
Then, this February, came a number that should have made front pages for a week. A GIS-based survey by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Wildlife Department, working the 154-kilometre stretch of the Indus between Chashma Barrage and Ramak, counted 135 dolphins in six days of direct observation. It mapped family groupings. It traced movement corridors. It did what science is supposed to do, which is turn a rumor of presence into a documented fact. It also recorded, in the same sweep, everything crowding that fact from every side. Fishing nets. Untreated domestic wastewater, industrial effluent, boat traffic and a river whose flow no longer behaves the way the dolphin’s instincts expect it to.
Somewhere in that same stretch of water sits one of a stranger, less-told chapters of the Bhulan’s recent history. Dolphins are not supposed to pass through a barrage. The gates are built to move water, not wildlife, and a dolphin caught in the wrong channel at the wrong moment usually ends up stranded, injured or dead in an irrigation canal miles away from the main river. Yet there have been documented instances of dolphins being swept through open barrage gates during high-flow releases and surviving the crossing, turning up alive on the far side of infrastructure designed to keep them out. Wildlife officials treat each such case as remarkable, worth a note in a survey report, sometimes worth a rescue operation to guide the animal back. It rarely travels further than that. A creature managing to cross a concrete gate built with no thought for its survival is, if anything, a metaphor too obvious for a country that keeps failing to notice it.
The Bhulan carries its own folklore, and not only the fisherman’s tale of a dolphin choosing invisibility. Older residents along the river speak of it as a guardian of drowning children, a creature that nudges the helpless toward the bank rather than let the current take them. Others treat a sighting as an omen, a sign that the river remembers something about a household or a boatman that the boatman himself has forgotten. None of this is biology. All of it is evidence of something biology alone cannot supply on its own. A species that once sat close enough to daily life earns a place in a region’s imagination. That closeness has thinned. Fewer people see the Bhulan now, so fewer stories get made about it, and the ones that survive are inherited rather than freshly told. A myth needs contact to renew itself. Take away the sightings and even the folklore starts to fade on the same schedule as the species it describes.
This is not a uniquely Pakistani predicament, and it is worth saying plainly that the world has already run this experiment to its worst conclusion. China’s Yangtze once held the baiji, a river dolphin every bit as singular as the Bhulan, cornered by dams, boat traffic and industrial pollution along one of the most crowded waterways on earth. By 2006 an international survey failed to find a single one. The baiji was declared functionally extinct, the first cetacean species wiped out by human activity in modern memory, and it happened with barely a ripple of public alarm until the ripple was all that was left. India’s Ganges River dolphin, the Bhulan’s closest living relative, survives today only through the kind of sustained, decades-long national attention that Pakistan has never quite mustered for its own version of the same animal. The lesson sitting in both cases is identical. A species this specialized does not announce its own decline. It simply stops being counted, then stops being reported, then stops being remembered, and by the time anyone notices, noticing has become an obituary rather than a warning.
None of this is helped by how the story usually gets framed when it does surface. A rescue makes the news because a rescue has drama, a team wading into a canal to save a stranded animal, a photograph that fits neatly above the fold. A population count rarely gets the same treatment, because a bare number carries no drama until someone does the work of supplying context. What it means against the count before it. What threats sit underneath it. What it would take to protect it. Pakistani newsrooms are not short of environmental stories waiting to be told this way. They are short of the habit of connecting a wildlife statistic to the wastewater pipe, the barrage gate and the sugar mill sitting a few kilometers upstream from it, as though the dolphin exists in a separate universe from the infrastructure quietly deciding its fate.
Which is the real argument here, and it has almost nothing to do with dolphins as such. Pakistan does not lack science on the Bhulan. It has three decades of population surveys, a functioning rescue program, a serious 2022 satellite-tagging effort that WWF describes as the first of its kind for river dolphins anywhere in Asia, and now a fresh, granular count from Chashma that should be the strongest evidence base the species has ever had. What it lacks is the machinery that turns evidence into public concern. A population figure released by a wildlife department does not become a story on its own. It needs a journalist willing to follow it past the press release, an editor willing to give it space against the day’s politics, a platform willing to let a fisherman’s account of a changing river sit next to a scientist’s dataset instead of being treated as anecdote unworthy of print. Without that chain, the number 135 will do exactly what the number 1,987 did in 2017. It will circulate for a news cycle, then disappear into an archive nobody searches.
Call it a visibility problem, because that is what it is. An endangered species can be scientifically documented down to the family grouping and still be, for all practical purposes, invisible to the public whose taxes fund its protection and whose rivers determine its fate. The gap between what is known about the Bhulan and what is felt about it by ordinary Pakistanis is not a gap conservation science can close on its own. It is a media failure, a journalism failure, an institutional failure to communicate in a country that has never lacked information about its own environment, only the will to make that information matter to anyone beyond the department that collected it.
The Bhulan cannot see the river it swims through. It reads the water instead, by sound, by memory, by instinct honed over millions of years to work around a blindness that would kill any other creature. Pakistan has no such excuse. It has the surveys. It has the numbers. It has, as of this February, a fresh and specific count of a species clinging on in the very stretch of the Mighty Indus closest to where its problems are worst documented. What it does not have, yet, is the habit of looking. Until those changes, the dolphin will keep doing what the fisherman’s tale always said it would. It will keep choosing the bends nobody watches, trusting, wrongly, that survival and invisibility can indefinitely be the same thing.
