The continuous deaths of elephants in Assam’s Udalguri district has created deep concern among forest officials and wildlife experts. This area located near the Bhutan border is considered a very important corridor for elephants. In the last 20 days, four wild elephants have died here – three due to electrocution and one is suspected to have been poisoned. A total of 14 elephants have died in the last one year, out of which 10 were killed by electrocution. According to officials, increasing encroachment, shrinking forests and human-elephant conflict are rapidly deepening the crisis.
What is the reason behind the deaths?
Udalguri Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) Mustafa Ali Ahmed said most of the recent deaths have occurred in areas where local people cultivate paddy. He said, ‘People install electric wires to keep elephants away from the fields, due to which such accidents occur. Many times they do not even remove the wires installed around the fields.
Ahmed told that people illegally draw electricity from the government grid and lay metal wires, due to which elephants lose their lives. He said that out of the four incidents that took place on October 25, October 30, November 2 and November 3, three – Malleli Tea Estate, Bhutiachang Tea Garden and Basugaon – died due to electric shock. The latest case is of Amjuli Hatikhuli, where a six-year-old elephant was found dead after consuming suspected poisonous substance. In the incident of November 2, an elephant was found entangled in live wires. On October 30, a 40-year-old tusk elephant was also electrocuted in Bhutiachang Tea Garden. The Forest Department has arrested Sunil Ekka of Nonaipara and Ratan Chauhan of Basugaon. Apart from this, action has also been initiated against five other people.
Why do such incidents increase?
DFO Ahmed said that when elephants leave the forest and go to encroached areas in search of food, such incidents increase. He said that ‘due to increasing encroachment, the traditional routes of elephants are shrinking rapidly.’ He told that additional staff, vehicles and weapons have been sought, but the most important thing is to vacate the encroached forests. Assam’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) Vinay Gupta said that just as elephant conflict was reduced by large-scale eviction in Goalpara, the same needs to be done in Udalguri.
Old elephant corridor captured, herd lost its way
Experts say that the roots of elephant death are not just in encroachment, but are much deeper than that. Ananth Kumar Das, who has been researching elephant-human conflict for two decades, said that the natural corridor connecting the hills of Udalguri and Bhutan has been the path of elephants for centuries, but now a large part of it is surrounded by human settlements and farms.
He told, ‘Elephants are very intelligent and social animals. They use the same routes that their ancestors used 50–100 years ago, but now those routes have changed and humans have taken over the place. In such situations the herds go astray.
Herds of 100–150 elephants come from the hills of Bhutan every year from July to winter. Due to the narrow and scattered paths, these large herds get divided into small groups of 10–12. Das said elephants have strong sense of direction, but when their old paths become surrounded by fields or settlements, they become confused. Each herd is headed by a senior female, who is called Dhanari in the local language. She tries to avoid conflict, but when forests shrink, young elephants tend to wander off the path and become aggressive. Das said that during the study since 2006, he observed that the increase in illegal electrical wiring has increased the deaths manifold in recent years. He said, ‘We have blocked the natural routes of elephants and now we are killing them brutally. This needs to be stopped immediately.