Old homes threatened, Indian elephant moves to Haryana, Himachal

India has more than 27,000 elephants according to the elephant census titled ‘Synchronised elephant population estimation India 2017’ released on Saturday.

It is a “healthy” population, according to experts with no major fluctuation seen over years but human-elephant conflicts are definitely on the rise.

The elephant census is also showing an interesting but worrying trend. Many states that never reported any elephant population in previous census have reported elephants, which indicates a gradual expansion in elephant area.

This is of concern because it may lead to more human-elephant conflicts if these states fail to support the population with enough forest cover and adequate habitat for them to settle.

Elephant populations have been reported for the first time from Manipur, Mizoram,Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and the Andaman and Nicobars.

According to elephant expert R Sukumar, this gradual expansion could be due to disturbance in their original areas or due to climate change impacts like temperature and precipitation change. This expansion has been happening gradually over 30 years, he added.

There were 415 human deaths in conflicts cases in 2015-16 and 245 deaths in 2016- February 2017, according to data released by the environment ministry on Saturday.

About 45 elephants died in 2015-16 and 21 died in 2016-February 2017 due to electrocution. The census data shows Karnataka has the highest elephant population at 6,049 followed by Assam at 5,719 elephants. Even though the census data shows a decline in overall elephant population from 29391-30711 in 2012 to 27312 in 2017, experts said this was only due to a difference in the counting method.

Last year, some southern states had adopted both direct count and indirect count method for the census to arrive at more reliable population estimates.

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