Yes I worked hard with those very same people in South India, the Wildlife Association of South India, in the 1970s, GENTLY, diplomatically advising them (Indians don't like former colonial power, know-it-all types telling them how it should be done) about many things. One of its top men, an Indian, lived not only in India (he headed the United Nations' Food & Agriculture Overseas project in Karnataka, a very able man) but also just down the road from me in west London - useful, very useful, we became friends and a lot got talked about and a lot got done. The river and the fish thrived.
Then, twenty years later, in the 1990s, a British fishing travel agent began paying clients' moneys due to the Association straight into its new general manager's British bank / building society account, defrauding the Association and causing a major scandal and court case in south India, with the result that the Association lost its waters (leased to it by the State Government) to a State-owned travel operator.
Nothing appeared to change: the Brits and foreigners continued to arrive in ever-increasing numbers year on year, the riverside fishing camps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
But enemies were made, political (and some commercial) enemies, enemies that the old Association knew only too well and knew how to neutralise successfully.
The new kids on the block did not; didn't understand that camps full of beer-swilling foreigners were like a red rag to a bull to some in the State hierarchy...
So, Angling was banned in 2012.
Exit the mahseer, bombed to hell now that the rivers were no longer protected.
Shambolic. A disgrace. Both on the part of some Indians and of some very greedy Brits.
