New Plan to curb Human-Elephant conflict

The wildlife wardens of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal have inaugurated a new regional plan to tackle human-elephant conflict in eastern and central India. The new plan will be the first step towards better inter-state coordination to tackle over 3,000 elephants in this region.

Human-Elephant Conflict

Human-Elephant Conflict is broadly defined as “any human-elephant interaction that brings negative effects on social, economic or cultural life of humans, on elephant conservation or on the environment”.

Human-Elephant Conflict can be categorised as ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’.

Direct Conflicts

Direct conflicts impacts upon economic and physical well being of the rural communities. Examples of direct conflict are crop damage, human death and Injury, damage to food stores, damage to other properties.

Indirect Conflicts

Indirect conflicts results in indirect social impacts upon people. For example, the efforts put on by the farmers to their crops and property, the fear of injury or death, and psychological stress etc. However unlike the direct conflicts, the impact of indirect conflicts cannot be translated to economic value.

In 2016-17, the five states of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal had reported at least 253 deaths of people, which is the highest in the country. In addition, the region has witnessed huge amount of damage to crops and property. While these 5 states account for 10% of the elephant population of the country, it has accounted for 50% of deaths due to human-elephant conflict. The reason is increased dispersal of elephants out of forest areas in the last two-three decades. In the past 10-15 years, elephants have forayed into Chattisgarh which do not have any record of elephant habitation since the Mughal period. In Odisha, the elephants which used to live in 12-14 districts have now increased its presence in at least 30 districts. In West Bengal, the elephant presence has increased in the southern part of the state, where they were rare about 35 years ago.

According to the Ministry of Environment, on an average 400 elephants and 100 humans die every year due to human-elephant conflict.

Why Human-Elephant conflict occur?

Unlike tigers whose territories are within the protected areas, the elephants have only 20% of their range falling in the protected areas like national parks and sanctuaries. There are about 28 elephant reserves across India covering 61,830 sq. km. Due to deforestation and thinning out of forests, the elephants tend to disperse into areas with high density of human population. This has made the elephants to foray into areas where they had had no history of presence for several decades, even centuries. Destruction of elephant habitat has made them to move constantly.

Second, the growing human population has resulted in the expansion of human settlements in the elephant migration routes. This often results in the human-elephant conflicts. As of now, there are approximately 100 elephant corridors in the country. The conflict gets intensified when people try to chase away elephants with searchlights, crackers or guns, making the elephants even more aggressive.

Details of Plan

The new plan divides elephant habitats into three zones:

• Areas with forest cover where elephants can be conserved,
• Areas where humans and animals can co-exist,
• “elephant removal zones” in agricultural areas.

In the agricultural areas, the plan envisages to capturing the animals and relocating them to forest areas. If this fails, then some elephants may be kept under captivity.

The plan has incorporated various guidelines approved by the Karnataka High Court in 2010.

The plan also looks at capacity-building by training forest officials on how to tranquilise elephants and capture them. This will be taught to help the forest officials capture the errant elephants before they cause significant damage to life and property.

Challenges

The new plan requires the forest departments of the five states to coordinate. Effective coordination between the stakeholders will be the key to the success of this initiative. Also, a lot depends upon how these personnel-starved departments use their resources and train their officials in capturing elephants.

Short Note: Project Elephant

In our country there are approximately 30 thousand elephants spread in 16 Elephant states. Maximum number of elephants is in Kerala, followed by Karnataka and Assam. Project Elephant was launched in 1992 as a centrally sponsored scheme to assist the States on three key areas:

• Protection of wild elephants, their habitat and corridors
• Address the issue of man-animal conflict and
• Welfare of domesticated elephants

Short Note: Importance of Asian Elephants

Since 1986, Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) has been categorised as endangered species by the IUCN as its population has declined by at least 50% in the last three generations. Decline in population of Asian elephants are generally attributed to the habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation.

Taxonomically, elephants belong to family Elephantidae. However, only two genera extant are present viz. Elephas and Loxodonta. Genus Elephas is of the Asian Elephants. There is only one surviving species of this Genus viz. Elephas maximus and elephants of this species are found in natural conditions only in Asia. This species has three subspecies viz. Indian Elephant: Elephas maximus indicus; Sri Lankan Elephant: Elephas maximus maxicus; and Mainland Asian Elephants: Elephas maximus sumatranus.