With high speed corridors soon to become a reality, a track policy for animal accident prevention is needed
The Gir lion is living on the edge with a widely fragmented habitat and human encroachment, the latest news of a pride of three being mowed down by a goods train in Gujarat’s Amroli district prompting a debate on whether infrastructural development factors in the welfare of the wild enough. The accident happened in the midnight hour with neither the train driver nor the lions, three in all, able to figure out how dangerously close they were to each other. Although investigations are on to determine if the goods train driver was complying with speed limits set for transiting wildlife corridors or if the forest trackers were doing their job of monitoring animal movement, fact is we need to strongly pursue an accident prevention scheme for wildlife along our rail tracks. The existing infrastructure has been in long use, and though it bifurcates forest corridors which animals use to disperse into new territories, any future accident prevention module has to work around this reality. Cases of elephants, tigers, leopards and other species being run over by trains are not new, our elephant deaths along tracks being the highest in the world. And we have been attempting to control them through several measures like the installation of warning signs for train drivers in sensitive stretches, night patrols along tracks and introducing staff to assist with elephant crossings since 2002.
This was also replicated in Assam in 2008 with some success. But with the railway networks spreading and high speed corridors soon to become a reality, a unified railway policy needs to be worked out on a predictive model. Even the West is besieged by similar issues of track accidents and has tried out or proposed several remedial measures. Some have mooted the idea of reflectors to warn incoming animals of a possible impact zone, others have talked about some fencing in stretches or erecting olfactory barriers that involves spraying a foam of predator scents, including that of man, on vegetation and structures nearer the track. Poland, in fact, introduced a “key stimuli proxy”, a device emitting acoustic signals of natural sounds which aggravate the fear factor in animals, deterring them from approaching the tracks or straying off their habitat. But the problem with artificial control is that animals, and particularly an intelligent one like the lion, can evolve and mutate once they sense a mechanised pattern. A far cheaper option then, as many wildlife experts have suggested, would be to build overpasses or underpasses where tracks cut through wildlife habitats, allowing the animals the right of way safely.
We have somewhat reconciled ourselves into believing that humans cannot have territorial curbs but animals must be squeezed in their shrinking ranges and be forced to adapt. This lopsided policy has resulted in Gir lions spilling out of their ranges and almost cohabiting with villagers, letting go of their feline aggression for a tamer behavioural adjustment. More lions will stray in the absence of a transit to an alternative home. With the latest incident, the number of lions, including cubs, having died in and around the Gir forest since September has reached 35. While some of them have died of natural causes, many others fell prey to Canine Distemper Virus (CDV), protozoa infections and territorial fights necessitating isolation. Our national pride is indeed struggling to roar.
