Today is World Elephant Day and almost to the day, a couple of years ago I was in Chhattisgarh working on a project to understand the impacts of coal mining on elephants and tribals. The local group with whom I worked with mentioned to me that a young elephant (sub-adult) has been captured by the forest department and its being tamed. Apparently, the elephant has crossed six districts covering quite a long distance without causing any harm to anyone or damaging anything. Unfortunately on arrival at the chief minister’s constituency Rajnandgaon, it came into contact with a person and she was killed in that encounter. This incident created a huge outrage among the villagers as encountering elephant in their living quarters was a new phenomenon for them. This forced the forest department to capture the animal, instead of releasing it back into the wild they have taken it to be tamed for reasons best know only to the forest department officials.
Few days later I visited the elephant which was is in captivity by then. The very sight of it saddened me - legs were bleeding because of the friction of the chains it was tied to, with all four legs tide in four directions. The thought crossed my mind instantly was that even the worst criminals shouldn’t be treated in such a manner. The forest staff’s “no experience” in handling the whole situation was even more heartening to witness. After the issue got a negative traction in the local media and from the wildlife enthusiast the elephant was moved to Achanakmar tiger reserve.
This issue is not new to the state at large. Chhattisgarh houses the best forests in the country. Though it did not have elephant presence for close to a century, in late 1980’s elephants were moving in due to mining pressures in the neighboring states of Odisha and Jharkhand. Initially a few herds moved into the state in search of new territories, causing damage to both property and crop along the way. The trend increased over the years gave rise to the number of elephants coming into the state. The good quality forest cover also assisted in providing a permanent place for these elephants to live and move.
With more elephants, human-elephant conflict also increased to new heights. The state government called in experts from the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) to assess the situation and suggest mitigation measures. The experts pointed out that the good forests in the region can be permanent habitat for the elephants which might help reduce the conflict. The state government then for a moment seemed like doing the right thing by proposing to form three elephant reserves and keeping the forest connections alive so that the elephants have a larger area to move. However, this did not go very well with coal lobby (local wing of Confederation of Indian Industries - CII) which demanded that the elephant reserve to be moved to another area since they intend to mine large parts of the identified elephant reserves for coal. The elephant reserve proposal was then modified by the state government leaving one of the three proposed reserves (Lemru close to 500sqKm) and notified existing protected area as elephant reserves making the whole exercise futile.
Currently, Chhattisgarh together with Odisha and Jharkhand are worst affected states of Human- Elephant conflicts. These three states combined have less than 10% of the elephants but account for close to 65% of human casualty due to human-elephant conflict of the entire country. Instead of protecting the forests government’s come with ideas of creating plantations in one place for destroying forests in another and capturing elephants and taming them which are not only proved to be cruel to the animal but also doesn’t help solve the problem. It is unfortunate that, those who subsist on the land close to the forests are the ones who are paying the price for it.
The state’s bias towards mining over protecting our forests actually have pushed these gentle giants to put up a real hard fight with us - the humans – to secure their habitat. Elephants doesn’t seems to buy in the government’s argument on development and move away to live in a plantations created elsewhere – I stand in admiration of them as they continue to fight for their right to exist.
As we observe the World Elephant Day today which interestingly falls close to our Independence Day - let’s speak freedom to the elephants and to their homes which are currently colonized by humans and their developmental scheme.