World Elephant Day: India lost 528 jumbos in 5 years

Aksheev Thakur

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 12

India lost 528 elephants in the past five years due to poaching, electrocution, train accidents and poisoning. As many as 50 elephants were killed by poachers, 392 died due to electrocution, 13 succumbed to poisoning and 73 were killed in train accidents during this period.

Human-elephant conflict resulted in the death of 2,827 persons since 2019. According to the last survey of the Asian elephants in 2017, there are over 30,000 elephants in India.

Forest officials point out that mining and infrastructure projects in elephant corridors pose a threat to the population of jumbos.

“Several infrastructure projects have come up in elephant corridors in states such as Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Odisha and Assam. In November 2020, the Uttarakhand Wildlife Board denotified the Shivalik Elephant Reserve to expand the Jolly Grant airport in Dehradun,” a senior Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer told The Tribune.

In 2007, the Odisha Government decided to notify 14 elephant corridors. The NGT also directed the Odisha Government to notify the corridors in 2021. But, these are still pending due to pressure from mining groups.

While the Union Environment Ministry launched Project Elephant in 1992, it remained highly understaffed and underfunded, officials pointed out.

“Elephant reserves and corridors have no legal sanctity under the Wildlife Protection Act. Project Elephant’s budgetary allocation has remained around ~30-35 crore for several years, which is nothing when it comes to manning 2,400 sq km of forest reserves across the country. In 2023, Project Elephant and Project Tiger were merged, which was not a sound decision,” the IFS officer said.

Forest officials believe that given the threats, which elephants and tigers face, Project Elephant and Project Tiger should have continued.

“There was no strategic plan to strengthen the Project Elephant by providing sufficient funding. In fact, Project Elephant could never become successful like Project Tiger,” the official said.