NEW DELHI — The night train to Silchar was moving fast — too fast, the authorities say.
As
it chugged into a forested area of northeastern India on Saturday
night, a group of villagers waved their flashlights frantically, urging
the driver to slow down. He didn’t know why, but he soon found out.
Ahead
in the darkness, a large herd of elephants was ambling across the
railway tracks. When the train driver finally saw what was in front of
him, he hit the emergency brake, railway officials said, but it was too
late.
The
14-car passenger train plowed right into the herd. Two calves and two
adult elephants were killed instantly, and an adult elephant that was
badly injured died on Monday. Some local news reports
said that several baby elephants had not even moved as the train
approached, and that adult elephants had sought to protect them by
surrounding them.
Indian forestry officials said the warnings had been ignored for a simple reason: The train was running 10 minutes late.
“The
driver was trying to cover up the time,” said P. Sivakumar, a senior
forestry officer in northern Assam, the state where the accident
happened. The incident is now under investigation.
In
some parts of India, especially in the northeast, it is quite common
for elephants to pass through populated regions or to step across
railway tracks — or even four-lane highways — in search of food.
Many
areas have been designated elephant corridors, where drivers are
supposed to proceed with caution.
In
the case over the weekend, the train operator was traveling above the
speed limit of 30 kilometers, or about 20 miles, an hour, forestry
officials said. Earlier in the day, the Forestry Department had sent
several urgent notifications to railway operators that a large elephant
herd was moving through the Habaipur area, about 250 kilometers north of
Silchar, near India’s border with Bangladesh. The area is deep green on
most maps, and a well-known refuge for elephants.
This episode is the latest in an unfortunate pattern. As recently as December, a train in Assam killed five adult elephants, including one that was pregnant.
But
in India’s wildlife community, the latest accident seems to have
reverberated more, adding to the sadness and outrage that has been
building.
“The railways need to be held accountable,’’ said Prerna Singh Bindra, a conservationist and writer.
“How come we have not learned our lessons?”
About two weeks ago, Ms. Bindra and more than a dozen other wildlife advocates sent a letter to India’s railway minister pointing out this very problem.
“Our elephants are in trouble,’’ the letter began.
It
then laid out several steps to help prevent train-elephant accidents,
including building underpasses beneath railway lines for the animals,
and telling passengers not to throw food out of the windows, as that
encourages hungry animals to linger along the tracks.
Wildlife
experts say that India has the largest number of train accidents
involving elephants in the world, with hundreds killed in the past 20
years. Many accidents tend to involve one or two animals, though in late
2013, five elephants were killed by a train in the Indian state of West Bengal, another area where such collisions happen frequently.
Sadly
for the elephants, the number of collisions with trains seems to be
rising. For example, in West Bengal, there were 27 such deaths from 1974
to 2002. But from 2004 to 2015, a much shorter period, there were 65,
and there were as many as 30 killed in the last five years alone, according to Indian environmentalists.
Train
accidents are just one of the many threats elephants in India face.
Some of the animals have been poached for their ivory, others poisoned
by farmers angry at them for eating their crops. At the same time,
forests are being cleared for timber and farms, and more train tracks
and highways are being built all around the country. The wide open wild
spaces where elephants used to roam are fragmenting as India’s human
population, now 1.3 billion, grows.
Asian elephants are considered endangered, with at most around 50,000 left. A recent study
showed a dip in India’s elephant population, though scientists
disagreed over whether this was because of a change in how the elephants
were counted or if there were actually fewer elephants.
“We
revere the elephant as a god, as Ganesha,” Ms. Bindra said, referring
to one of Hinduism’s most popular deities. “Yet at the same time, we are
in a situation where we have elephants dying and being chased off areas
with human habitation.’’
Perhaps, then, it is a cruel paradox that the mascot of Indian Railways is an elephant.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/world/asia/india-train-elephants.html
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