Patna: District magistrate Kumar Ravi on Wednesday underlined the need for Gangetic dolphin conservation during the concluding day of a fortnight-long training programme on the same topic.

Ravi spoke at length about the importance of biodiversity and how the rising pollution level had emerged as a major threat to it. "It is duty of all of us to work for checking pollution in this river and conserve its biodiversity," he said.

The training programme had been organised by the Patna regional office of the Zoological Survey of India.

The event aimed to create a pool of master trainers who would not only work as conservation personnel but also impart skills to others.

Twenty-two youths from Bihar, Bengal, Jharkhand and Kerala took part in the training programme during which they were briefed on topics like traits of dolphins, their geographical distribution and conservation measures among others.

Speaking at the concluding function, ZSI regional head and programme coordinator Gopal Sharma said exhaustive information about dolphins was shared with the trainees by experts from the field. He said the trainees were also taken for field visits to have first-hand information about aquatic mammals and other conservation-related things.

Sharing more details about the training programme, Sharma said that the training programme had been organised under the green skill development programme, which aims at creating a pool of 5.5 lakh trained personnel by 2021 in the country in 32 different aspects related to conservation work.

Some of the trainees, too, were given a chance to share their experience about the training programme and all of them praised it, stating that they got to learn a lot of things from experts during the classroom sessions and field visits helped them understand things in a better way.