NEW DELHI – It was Independence Day, a holiday across India. But in Jhargram, a town in the eastern state of West Bengal, locals were busy chasing off a herd of six elephants that had strayed into their neighbourhood on Aug 15.
The confrontation quickly degenerated into tragedy.
Someone threw a flaming spear at one of the animals, impaling its back. The animal – which turned out to be a pregnant female – writhed in pain for several hours before it died. A video of the assault went viral, drawing attention yet again to increasing instances of human-elephant conflict in India and how poorly the country manages them.
India is said to have around 30,000 Asian elephants in the wild, the largest such population in the world.
Increasingly, however, the country has less and less space for them as infrastructure development and other human activity encroach into the habitat of these long-ranging animals. This has led to a rise in human-elephant conflict in India, with hundreds of elephants and humans killed each year.
It is an issue that came back into focus in October with a government census report suggesting that India’s elephant population had declined by as much as 20 per cent since 2017. The report has yet to be released publicly, but some aspects of it were described in an article in The Indian Express newspaper published on Oct 3.
According to the report by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), “mushrooming developmental projects”, such as “unmitigated mining” and infrastructure construction, have emerged as significant threats for elephants.
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The newspaper story added that the census report had been printed for distribution but the copies have been “gathering dust” since February 2024 because the government has delayed the report’s release. The WII, an autonomous government body, conducts an elephant census every five years in the country.
According to India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the “interim draft report” lacked a “uniform methodology”, leading to discrepancies in data collection. A final census count is now expected by June 2025.
Nevertheless, the state of India’s elephants is a matter of concern. As many as 528 of them were killed between April 2019 and March 2024 because of collisions with trains that pass through their habitat, electrocution, poaching and poisoning.
The numbers of humans killed in conflicts with elephants also peaked in the 2024 financial year at 629, compared with 586 in FY2020, according to government data. This is much higher than the 125-odd human deaths reported annually in the early 1980s.
A key threat is mining in central and eastern India, which has pushed elephants out of their dense forest habitats into less forested areas with human habitation and activity, often turning them into crop-raiders and fuelling human-elephant conflicts. According to the shelved report, elephant populations in central and eastern India recorded a 41 per cent drop compared with 2017 estimates. Many of the elephants are believed to have relocated to other forests, leading to a surge in the elephant population in some areas.
Elephants are also increasingly drawn to human habitations on the fringes of forests because of developments in agriculture, such as better irrigation, which have made it possible for farmers to cultivate multiple crops all year round, offering elephants an alternative and often easier supply of more nutritious food than in the wild.
“The attractive sources of food for the elephants outside the forest have now increased,” said Professor Raman Sukumar, an Indian ecologist who has studied elephants for over four decades. “So that’s also perhaps pulling them out of the forests into these (human-inhabited) areas,” he told The Straits Times.
Other threats have emerged, including in forest habitats that are relatively well protected. Invasive species such as Lantana camara, a toxic weed, have taken over vast forest tracts in South India and elsewhere, reducing the natural fodder base for elephants and pushing them out of these forests.
Multiple efforts have been made to minimise human-elephant conflict in India, including artificial intelligence-based surveillance to prevent elephant casualties on railway tracks. An app, Haati, has also been launched in Assam that warns people of approaching elephant herds so that they get out of the way.
But Mr Sayan Banerjee, a doctoral scholar at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru, said such efforts, even though well-intentioned and somewhat effective, are reactive measures.
“These interventions are more like creating a new solution after a problem is intentionally put in place,” he told ST, referring to India’s “unsustainable growth model and consumption patterns (that) do not have space for thinking about ecological repercussions”.
“Infrastructure is planned and implemented over an elephant habitat, and then the bandwagon of solutions comes into place. Why not plan the infrastructure in a different way altogether?” added Mr Banerjee.
“If we cannot address these questions, we will keep on inventing band-aid solutions in the form of newer kinds of fences or apps or AI-based solutions,” he said.
Elephant reserves, which are much bigger than tiger reserves and often span across states, are exposed to far greater developmental pressures today. For instance, the Hasdeo Aranya forest in central India’s Chhattisgarh state, home to the Lemru Elephant Reserve, is a major migration corridor and habitat for elephants. But parts of the forests are being cleared for coal mining. Expanding tea plantations, a growing network of highways and oil extraction projects are also wreaking havoc on elephant habitats in the north-east.
And while forests are shrinking, traditional natural corridors used by these animals are also being encroached upon, leading to fragmented habitats and isolated populations. This has resulted in inbreeding and an increased susceptibility to diseases such as elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus haemorrhagic disease, an acute viral infection that usually hits young Asian elephants.
Allocation of funds to Project Elephant, a government scheme to protect the animal, has also historically been much lower compared with Project Tiger, severely curtailing protection measures. While Project Tiger had a budget of three billion rupees (S$46.8 million) in 2022-23, Project Elephant was allocated just 350 million rupees.
Noting that there is growing concern over human-elephant conflict, Prof Sukumar said India needs “very serious policy-level discussions” to determine its overall strategic goals for elephant conservation.
“I think we need to make a decision about where we want to keep elephants and where we would not allow them to go,” he told ST, recommending a three-zone model.
The first would be an elephant conservation zone, which would include inviolate national parks and sanctuaries as well as forested tracts that have very little human habitation, if at all.
The second comprises “fairly integral elephant landscapes”, which would allow for elephant-human coexistence outside the conservation zone, with activities such as agriculture, including coffee or tea plantations, that are accompanied by active conflict mitigation measures, including fencing, alert systems and compensation for losses.
The rest of the country would fall under an “elephant exclusion zone”, Prof Sukumar said.
“This means proactive management of catching the elephants from here, putting them back in the forest and preventing them from going outside, and, in cases where elephants have killed several people, retaining them in captivity,” he added.