Two elephants were killed after being hit by a speeding train at an elephant corridor located between Dimapur in Nagaland and Khatkhati in Assam in the wee hours of Tuesday.
The incident took place around 12:25 am when the New Delhi-Diburgarh Rajdhani Express ran into an elephant, said North-East Frontier Railway Chief Spokesperson Pranavjyoti Sharma while adding that the elephant herd came towards the railway tracks after being chased by settlers nearby with firecrackers.
Sharma said that the NFR had instituted a four-member enquiry team comprising Railway and forest officials to probe how the elephants got killed. He said that after the incident the stretch of the railway tracks have been blocked by the elephants for several hours, resulting in delay in different train schedules.
The Forest officials on the other hand said that the place of occurrence is a designated elephant corridor and so the trains should have been moving at a reduced speed there, preferably at 20 kmph.
Although the forest officials claimed that they have asked the district authorities and Railways to regulate train speeds in elephant corridors, yet the NFR officials said they have not received any official request from the forest department to cut down speed on the Dimapur-Khatkhati section.
It may be mentioned here that the Dimapur-Khatkhati section was a low-speed zone owing to soft ground requiring slow movement of trains. Several elephants get hit by trains in Assam. In February 2014, a passenger train had mowed down three elephants in eastern Assam’s Jorhat district.