18 deaths in 6 months: How can Kerala save its elephants?

There have been so many stories, one almost every other day in the newspapers. It has stopped shocking the readers. Elephants die. They keep dying. A slow tilt of the head, a sympathetic ‘tch’, and they turn the page, they forget.

But on Twitter a few days ago, there were posts, retweets about an elephant’s death. Kolakkadan Jagannathan has ‘fallen’ as they say in Malayalam. And he is the 18th casualty in Kerala this year. Before even June has ended. 18 elephants in 6 months. Averaging three a month.

He and singer Chitra Iyer, the other founder of the group, are approaching the state Head of the Forest Force, PK Kesavan, with a solution plan they have drawn up. “It should be done at the state level. There are less than 400 elephants in the state (excluding the wild ones) and these are being paraded for all the festivals across Kerala through October to May. Most of these are owned by private concerns. The Devaswom Board comes only after that. The elephants go from one festival to the other, one day in Kannur, the next day in Thiruvananthapuram. They get no rest, they are not properly fed. It is after the festive season that elephants die,” he lists out the problem first.


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