Assam’s Elephant Emergency

One sultry afternoon in October 2002, a small paddy farmer (who prefers not to be named) in Sonitpur district in the northeastern Indian state of Assam bought a few packets of Demecron, an organophosphorus-based pesticide. Demecron was then banned in the district; however, the lethal pesticide was still abundantly available in the black market as it continued to fetch buyers like him among the district’s farmers. The reason was obvious: to deter pests that had been regularly raiding crops in various parts of the district.

Significantly, the pest they were using Demecron to deter was of a different kind — something that isn’t normally seen as a pest or vermin but revered as a living embodiment of god in India. This “pest” rumbles through the jungle, trampling tall thickets of grass and bushes, but could be as stealthy as a slithering snake in its nightly crop depredations. It was nothing other than a herd of wandering wild elephants that plundered on croplands, as forests — the herd’s natural source of food, and habitat — had dramatically dwindled in the district due to rampant illegal logging, and human settlements gnawing away at the green spaces.

The district administration’s ban on Demecron had come following the death of more than a dozen wild elephants due to poisoning in the district’s Nameri and Haleswar areas the previous year — between July and November, 2001 — an event that jolted conservationists across the region.


To read the full article, click on the story title.