In a tragedy of mammoth proportions three female elephants were killed after being hit by a speeding train in Assam’s Hojai district in the wee hours of Monday. What compounds the tragedy is the fact that one of the elephants was pregnant and the badly injured tusker delivered her calf before breathing her last.
Sadly, the calf was stillborn as it had died in the womb due to the impact of the collision with the train.
The mishap took place in Jugijan, nearly 137 km from Assam’s capital Guwahati.
Railway officials said that the Dibrugarh-bound Vivek Express hit the herd of elephants that was trying to cross over to the other side of the tracks in the dark. This incident comes on the back of another that took place two months after the high-speed Rajdhani Express hit and killed two elephants, a female and its calf, along the Assam-Nagaland border in September this year.
A Railway patrolling team discovered the carcasses of the calf and the three elephants aged about 15, 13, and 3 years at the accident site on Monday morning and alerted the State Forest Department.
locals blamed the callousness and insensitivity of the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) and the forest department for the misfortune and said that it was because of the high speed of the train that the elephants were killed.
The forest department also failed to arrange any regular patrol in the area despite knowing that the elephants frequent the area and cross the railway tracks to reach the other side of the forest.
Along with other parts of the country, Assam has also been witnessing elephants being knocked down by speeding trains and considering these facts the Union Ministry of Environment and forests had in 2010 issued a general advisory so such tragedies could be avoided.
Although the Railway authorities keep on alerting the train drivers to maintain a speed limit of 50 kmph while crossing through elephant corridors, yet incidents of speeding trains killing elephants keep on happening from time to time.
There are 27 such identified elephant corridors falling under NFR and the train drivers are not only supposed to limit their speed but are also required to blow the train whistle constantly while crossing these areas.
According to a statement by NFR chief spokesperson, Pranav Jyoti Sarma, “A herd of wild elephants came on to the railway tracks and collided with the train engine. However, neither did the train stall nor was there any injury to any passenger. The driver of the train reported the incident at Jugijan Railway Station.”
He said that the train was delayed by half an hour but reached Dibrugarh on Monday morning safely. “The spot of occurrence is not a notified elephant corridor. As such there was no speed restriction on the section. This is the first time such an accident of train knocking down elephants happened at the location. Following the incident, all train drivers are alerted to avoid recurrence of such accidents for the safety of passengers and elephants,” the NFR spokesman said.