Spotlight on rise in human-elephant conflict in India

Hundreds of people and elephants killed yearly as human activity encroaches into their habitat

- Debarshi Dasgupta

It was Independence Day, a holiday across India. But in Jhargram, a town in the eastern state of West Bengal, locals were busy chasing off a herd of six elephants that had strayed into their neighbourhood on Aug 15.

The confrontation quickly degenerated into tragedy.

Someone threw a flaming spear at one of the animals, impaling its back. The animal which turned out to be a pregnant female writhed in pain for several hours before it died. A video of the assault went viral, drawing attention yet again to increasing instances of human-elephant conflict in India and how poorly the country manages them.

India is said to have around 30,000 Asian elephants in the wild, the largest such population in the world.

Increasingly, however, the country has less and less space for them as infrastructure development and other human activity encroach into the habitat of these long-ranging animals. This has led to a rise in human-elephant conflict in India, with hundreds of elephants and humans killed each year.

It is an issue that came back into focus in October with a government census report suggesting that India's elephant population had declined by as much as 20 per cent since 2017. The report has yet to be released publicly, but some aspects of it were described in an article in The Indian Express newspaper published on Oct 3.

According to the report by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), "mushrooming projects", such as "unmitigated mining" and infrastructure construction, have emerged as significant threats for elephants developmental The newspaper story added that the census report had been printed for distribution but the copies have been "gathering dust" since February 2024 because the government has delayed the report's release.

The WII, an autonomous government body, conducts an elephant census every five years in the country.