"People call me a founder of the SSTCN, which is okay, but the truth is that the group has had to find a founder every year!" says Tito Chandy with a laugh. And he's right... this is one of the more extraordinary facts about the Students' Sea Turtle Conservation Network — a student volunteer group that has been active in Chennai now for 25 years.

'Turtle walks' have been synonymous with Chennai for decades now. From December to April, every night since 1988, school and college students have walked the seven-kilometre stretch from Neelankarai to Besant Nagar, scouring the beach for freshly dug nests of the endangered olive ridley sea turtle before the eggs can be taken away by poachers for the market. When found, the eggs are relocated for their safety to a shelter or 'hatchery', and monitored there; weeks later, when the tiny turtle hatchlings emerge, they are released into the sea.

But, it wasn't students who began this conservation trend. In the 1970s, the first such walks were started by herpetologist Rom Whitaker and S Valliappan along the beach between Madras and Kalpakkam. Whitaker writes about this first effort in 1974, when he and a bunch of enthusiasts "rescued 14,000 olive ridley eggs from poaching and released the 9000 that hatched". This was also around the time, 1973, when the spectacular mass-nesting or arribadas of olive ridleys along the Orissa coast was first reported to the world.

By the 1980s, olive ridleys became mainstream news and the WWF and the Forest Department took on the role of monitoring the beach and popularizing the walks among Chennai's nature lovers. "But, a few years later, in 1987, the state-sponsored hatchery was shut down," says Tito Chandy, "which was when the idea for a volunteer group to carry on the work materialized. Someone had to do it."

The Students' Sea Turtle Conservation Network, or SSTCN, was therefore created by Chandy, along with friends Arif Razack and Sudhakar Muthyala. He says, "I was a post graduate student at Madras Christian College then. We met with the Chief Wildlife Warden to get permission to set up a hatchery on the beach at Neelankarai. And printed and sold about 900 'Save the Ridley' stickers for ten rupees each, collecting about 10,000 rupees to buy the material to build the hatchery."

Satish Bhaskar, an IITian who spent years studying sea turtles in the Andaman and Lakshadweep Islands, was an early mentor to the group. "We also learned a lot from the poachers, especially one called Mayavan — simply by trying to beat him in getting to the nests!" chuckles Chandy.

Autonomy and shared leadership

What makes the SSTCN unique is that in these 25 years, its existence has depended entirely on a small army of student volunteers. It's not surprising that for the young students, a form of 'anarchism' was an appealing idea while laying down the rules. The protocol in those early years was — no one person would be considered a 'leader' or face of the group and all work was to be entirely voluntary.

This has helped the group to thrive even when dedicated volunteers moved out of the city. When Chandy left, for instance, in 1990 to pursue a PhD in wildlife management, Kartik Shanker, another young student, took over coordination for the next few years. Since then, senior volunteers have been taking up the baton at every stage when a student has left the city to pursue higher education or a career outside.

Which explains why the group needs a new 'founder' every year! Arun V, who has now been shepherding the group's activities for 15 years, says, "There's the fear that no volunteers will turn up for a season. But there are always some really dedicated students who take this work very seriously. Some years ago, Sanjiv Gopal used to walk the stretch six days a week and even attend college alongside! In 1992-93, the entire season was managed by girls, with Nina Subramani as the co-ordinator."

A career builder

Shravan Krishnan has just finished a B Com from Loyola College and is this year's hatchery co-ordinator. He says, "Almost a 1500 people have come just to see the hatchlings being released this year and another thousand people signed up for the walks earlier. Only about 60 or so are regular walkers however."

Ten thousand hatchlings have been released into the sea off Madras by the SSTCN in the last few months. Going by the prevailing scientific belief that only one in a thousand hatchlings will survive to adulthood, it's possible that only ten of the ridleys released this year will head back to these beaches to mate and nest when they reach sexual maturity around fifteen years from now.

With the conservation problems that these reptiles are up against, this is, at best, a trifling effort to save the species, despite the long hours of rigorous work put in by the students. So why do they continue to do this?

The nesting of these prehistoric giants at the doorstep of this sprawling metropolis is a spectacle of natural history that has awed many of the city's youngsters. So much so, many SSTCN volunteers have actually gone on to have successful careers in conservation and wildife science. Tito Chandy was director of Greenpeace, India. Kartik Shanker went on to study sea turtles in places around the world and is now a professor at the IISc. Sanjiv Gopal is now with Greenpeace International. Divya Karnad, who volunteered until 2009, is pursuing a PhD on fisheries sustainability from Rutgers University. Joseph Raja, another former volunteer, is an aspiring wildlife filmmaker and is assisting on a film on Indian wolves. Adhith Swaminathan, who started walking while he was in class 6, is now working on a leatherback sea turtle project in Little Andaman island.

There are countless stories like this. "Volunteers seem to become more aware about their environment on these walks," says Arun. "Nishant, a volunteer and now a third year college student, has taken this great initiative to reduce use of plastic bags in his neighbourhood and has taken to making and distributing recycled cloth bags."

The way ahead

"If there's one problem I could find with the group, it is that it was never really able to engage with the local fisher communities," says Kartik Shanker. "It was always a group of urban, privileged kids who came for the walks. But, Arun has done a lot recently to involve the fishers."

The SSTCN has also recently broadened its scope. Since 2008, volunteers have extended the walks to include the stretch from Foreshore Estate to Marina Beach, a stretch that yielded 160 nests this year. This means more beaches and the need for more volunteers... the good news is that more than a thousand youngsters signed up for the walks this year.