Elephants have long been part of Indian culture. They appear in Hindu mythologies and in ancient Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, art work and literature, so Indians have great respect for the animals. The definitive film for elephants in Indian cinema has to be ‘Haathi Mere Saathi,’ made in 1971 which was a Bollywood hit. Possibly, as many as six of every ten wild Asian elephants live in India.
The most recent estimate of the wild population of elephants in India is over 26,000 elephants. India is also home to 3,500 captive elephants, with ancient traditions of captive care. Elephants are crepuscular. They are classified as mega herbivores and consume up to 150 kg (330 lb) of plant matter per day. They are generalist feeders, and both grazers and browsers, and were recorded to feed on 112 different plant species, most commonly of the order Malvales, and the legume, palm, sedge and true grass families. They browse more in the dry season with bark constituting a major part of their diet in the cool part of that season. They drink at least once a day and are never far from a permanent source of fresh water. They need 80–200 liters of water a day and use even more for bathing. At times, they scrape the soil for clay or minerals. Since 1986, the Asian elephant has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List, as the population has declined by at least 50 percent over the last three generations, estimated to be 60–75 years.
Human–elephant conflict Asia’s largest vertebrate, requires living space, food and water, and the search for these often conflicts with human aspirations and needs.
One of the major instigators of human–wildlife conflict is competition for space. Destruction of forests through logging, encroachment, slash-and-burn, shifting cultivation, and monoculture tree plantations are major threats to the survival of elephants. Human–elephant conflicts occur when elephants raid crops of shifting cultivators in fields, which are scattered over a large area interspersed with forests.
Development such as border fencing along the India-Bangladesh border has become a major impediment to the free movement of elephants. In Assam, more than 1,150 humans and 370 elephants died as a result of human-elephant conflict between 1980 and 2003. In India alone, over 400 people are killed by elephants every year, and 0.8 to 1 million hectares are damaged, affecting at least 500,000 families across the country. In Kenya, for example, the solution to prevent an elephant bull from wandering into farms and destroying precious crops was to tag the elephant with a device that sends a text message when it crosses a geo-fence.
The survival of the elephant depends even more on taking its cause to the people. Gajah (the elephant) and Praja (the people) have to go together. Losing sight of either dimension will harm both.
Project Elephant was launched by the Government of India in the year 1992 as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) for the protection of elephants, their habitat and corridors and address issues of human-animal conflict. The main stated objective of Project Elephant is to ensure long-term conservation of viable populations of the Asian elephant and its natural habitats in India.
According to the Wildlife Protection Society of India, India has lost nearly 100 elephants in train-related accidents in the last five years. Moving at a slow pace, along with their calves, they fail to respond quickly enough to avoid a train hurtling towards them. In 2018, 26 elephants have succumbed to such collisions so far, the most recent incident being in Odisha’s Keonjhar, where an elephant was killed after being hit by a goods train. The sound of honeybees downloaded from the internet to keep elephants away from railway tracks has brought down the number of accidents. North East Frontier Railway has installed unique honey bee sound system at rail tracks to avoid elephants’ death in Assam.
There is a need for more robust and better systems of enumeration of not just the populations of elephants but also of the changing composition of these populations across age and gender.
(Dr Senapati is Dean, Computer Application and Science, BPUT, Professor and HOD, Chemistry, Trident Academy of Technology, Bhubaneswar.)
