There is a river in Madhya Pradesh that still remembers what it means to be free.
The Ken, historically known as the Karnavati, winds quietly through the Vindhyan plateau, cutting deep into ancient rocks before it meets the Yamuna in Banda, Uttar Pradesh. Unlike most rivers in India today, there are no factories along its banks. No industrial effluent poisons its bed. The shimmering water current moves over smooth stones hidden amongst plants along the coasts. It flows beneath the NH-39 bridge that links Khajuraho and Panna Tiger Reserve. For the creatures that have lived along this river for thousands of years, it is a vital source for their survival.
Carved By Time, Alive With Purpose
The river’s journey through the Bijawar-Panna hills carved out a gorge 60 kilometres long and up to 180 metres deep. At Raneh Falls in Khajuraho, this gorge opens into one of India’s most extraordinary geological spectacles, a mosaic of granite, dolomite, and quartz formed from volcanic rock millions of years old. Here, where the rock face drops in dramatic columns into the rushing water below, lives one of the world’s most ancient and imperilled reptiles, the critically endangered gharial (Gavialis gangeticus).
The Ken Gharial Sanctuary, established in 1981, was created specifically to protect this species on the Ken river. The gharial is no ordinary creature. It is among the oldest surviving reptile lineages on Earth, a living link to the age of dinosaurs, identifiable by its long, slender snout and the distinctive ghara, a bulbous growth at the tip of the male’s snout, from which its very name derives. Listed as Critically Endangered in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the global wild population of gharials is now numbering only in the hundreds. This crocodile species has exquisitely adapted to fast-flowing, clean, silt-rich rivers. It cannot thrive anywhere else. It does not adapt to still water. It does not colonise degraded rivers. It simply disappears from them.
For the gharial, the Ken is not merely a habitat. It is a lifeline calibrated over millennia. The river’s monsoon surge carries silt downstream, depositing the sandy banks where gharials bask, nest, and lay their eggs. Its fast, oxygen-rich currents sustain the mahseer and other fish that make up the gharial’s diet. The undisturbed gorge walls and deep pools offer shelter from the blistering Indian summer. Every element of the gharial’s existence on the Ken is bound to the river’s natural rhythm, its flow, its sediment, its seasonal surge and retreat.
The Tiger, The Forest, And The River
Upstream of Raneh Falls, the Ken flows through the heart of Panna Tiger Reserve, and here too, the river is not a backdrop. It is the foundation.
Panna carries one of the most remarkable recovery stories in Indian conservation history. By 2009, the reserve had lost every one of its tigers to poaching and habitat loss. A painstaking, decade-long effort to reintroduce tigers followed, and today Panna is once again home to a thriving population, a success story that conservationists across the world point to with pride. What made that recovery possible was Ken. The river sustains the dense forest through which tigers range, supports deer, nilgai, and sambar that form their prey base, and provides the water that entire food chains depend upon.
The reserve also shelters long-billed vultures (Gyps indicus), one of India’s most threatened birds, which nest in the gorge cliffs above the Ken. Mugger crocodiles (Crocodylus palustris) share the river with gharials. Spotted deer (Axis axis) come down to its banks at dusk. Otters swim through its shallows. Kingfishers dart low across its surface. The Ken does not support one species or two, it holds an entire interlocked community of life, each dependent on the others, all anchored to the flowing water below.
Strangling Ken
Walk along the Ken in May and you will find a river pulling itself back. Sandbars appear on the banks. The channel narrows to a thread. The gharials retreat to where deep pools remain. Everything waits for the monsoon.
Ken is a small river, and not a mighty one. In recent decades, illegal sand mining has scraped away at its bed, disrupting the groundwater that keeps it alive between rains. The monsoons across Bundelkhand have grown unreliable. In 2017, an academic study recorded what local fisherfolk already knew, the Ken had run completely dry for two consecutive years. Its water levels were not low, but dry! It is against this fragile backdrop that the impact of the project proposing linking Ken and Betwa rivers becomes truly visible.
What A Dam Would Mean For The Ken’s Wildlife
The scientific objections to the Ken-Betwa River Linkage Project, which happens to be the first one to link rivers, are substantial, and despite protests, have been largely ignored.
The proposed Daudhan Dam, 77 metres high, to be built within Panna Tiger Reserve, would create a reservoir that submerges 5,578 hectares of forest land and nearly 98 square kilometres of the Panna Tiger Reserve itself. That is roughly 10% of Panna’s core zone, the most ecologically dense and undisturbed portion of the reserve which would be drowned permanently underwater.
For tigers, the consequences extend beyond the loss of forest area alone. The dam would effectively split the Panna Tiger Reserve into two disconnected halves. Tigers are wide-ranging animals; their survival depends on being able to move freely across large territories, to find mates, establish ranges, and maintain the genetic diversity that keeps a small, recovering population healthy. A reservoir cutting through the middle of the reserve severs that connectivity.
For the gharial, the impact is even more direct. The proposed dam sits upstream of the Ken Gharial Sanctuary. When a large dam is constructed on a river, it fundamentally alters everything downstream of it, not just the volume of water, but its temperature, its sediment load, its seasonal timing, and its flow velocity. Gharials depend on all of these. Their nesting banks are shaped by the river’s natural silt deposit; the dam’s reservoir would trap that silt before it ever reaches the sanctuary downstream. The monsoon surge that scours and refreshes the riverbed, the very pulse to which gharial breeding is timed, would be diminished or disrupted. A river that no longer flows as it always has is, for the gharial, no longer a river it can survive in.
The Raneh Falls themselves, the geological wonder above the gharial sanctuary, 427 million years in the making, will face permanent alteration as water flow would drastically reduce downstream.
The deep gorge pools that crocodilians use for shelter, the fast channels that sustain mahseer, the sandy banks that gharials return to year after year to nest, all of these are bound to suffer grave consequences when the small river is put to the test.
Numbers That Cannot Be Undone
The estimates by the Forest Advisory Committee suggested 23 lakh (2.3 million) trees would be felled, a figure that counted only trees above a certain girth. Accounting for younger trees that will mature by the time construction reaches its final stage, the projected number of trees that will be lost within or adjacent to a protected tiger reserve is 30 lakh or beyond, a number that promises the environment’s devastation.
Forests are not merely collections of trees. They are the water retention system of the landscape, absorbing rainfall, recharging groundwater, moderating temperature, and holding soil in place. Removing millions of trees from a river catchment does not leave the river unchanged. It accelerates runoff, reduces dry-season flow, and worsens the very water stress the region already faces. The long-billed vultures that nest in Panna’s forest cliffs lose their nesting sites. The prey animals that sustain tigers lose their cover. The insects and amphibians and reptiles that hold the base of the food chain together lose their microhabitats altogether.
The adverse consequences of this project have been highlighted earlier as well. When conservationist Dr. M.K. Ranjitsinh Jhala, who spent five decades shaping India’s wildlife conservation policies, resigned from the Madhya Pradesh Wildlife Board in 2015, he said: “You can have either the interlinking project or the Panna Tiger Reserve. You cannot have both.”
The Ken Supports Life
Ken is not a surplus resource. It is a living system, and like all living systems, it has limits. The gharial that nests on its sandy banks, the tiger that drinks from its pools, the vulture that rides its thermals above the gorge, the mahseer that migrates through its cold currents, none of them can simply relocate when the water runs out or the flow stills. They are intricately bound to this river. Its survival is their survival, and vice versa.
Ken has carried life for millions of years, including all of recorded human history. The question now is whether we have the right to make this discontinue.
The River’s Forgotten Guardians
The Gond and Kol tribal communities have lived along the Ken’s banks for centuries. They have grown around the Ken, understanding its patterns, the monsoon surge, the dry season retreat. Tigers move through the same forests, gharials nest on the same safe banks. People and wildlife share the same water, and neither drive the other out. That quiet coexistence carried something no survey has measured, a deep knowledge of how Ken and its landscape works.
India has seen the story of disruption before. The Sardar Sarovar Dam in Gujarat displaced hundreds of thousands of Adivasi families from the Narmada valley despite years of protest. The Tehri Dam submerged 125 villages in Uttarakhand, and rehabilitation promises made then remain unfulfilled till today. In both cases, the communities who knew their rivers best were the ones to lose them.
In April 2026, tribal women of Chhatarpur and Panna lay down on funeral pyres in Dhondhan village, which came to be known as the Chita Andolan, with infants in their arms, asking for nothing more than a real rethink before their homes went under as the two rivers would be made to link. Months have passed, and their grievances still need actively listening ears.
Wildlife SOS has learnt through its own work, such as the Open Wells Conservation Project, the ‘Dancing Bear’ Project, and resolving human-elephant conflict in Chhattisgarh, that communities living closest to forests and wildlife are not obstacles to conservation, but significant guardians. They are the ultimate protectors of their homes. The Gond and Kol communities of the Ken basin carry crucial historical knowledge about this river and its benefits that are being ‘submerged’ by planning authorities and overlooked by the public eye. Losing them from this landscape does not just uproot families, it removes the best resource of understanding the whole ecosystem.
What We Stand To Protect
The gharial is one of India’s most ancient and yet, most endangered animals. Its presence on the Ken is not accidental, it reflects millions of years of ecological fit between a species and its river. Losing that is not a loss that can be compensated for or reconstructed. It is permanent.
The health of rivers is inseparable from the health of the wildlife that depends on them. The Ken, with its clear waters, its deep gorges, its gharials and tigers and vultures and many more diverse species, represents something that is becoming increasingly rare in India: a river that still functions as nature intended. Protecting it means protecting the entire web of life it sustains, one that took far longer to build, much longer than any dam ever took.
Ken river can still be saved, if awareness about its life-supporting ecosystem is shared and active support is given to it by citizens. To remain connected with important issues concerning wildlife and their habitats, do subscribe to our monthly newsletter today.
Feature Image: Vikas Singh/Wildlife SOS
