It was 8:45 in the morning and Gurappa was tending to his two-acre patch of coffee when he heard a familiar rustle. He froze, realising that just a few metres separated him from an unknown number of wild elephants hidden in the dense coffee bushes. Snapping out of the shock, he crouched down and saw the feet of at least three elephants. He didn’t waste another minute, scuttling away as fast as he could, crouching all the while.
“I was scared for my life,” says the 60-year-old farmer, spry enough to reenact his narrow escape some hours later at his home in Sakaleshpur taluk. Shashidhar, his son, chips in. “We are constantly on the lookout for elephants. And unless it is really necessary, we have stopped going out after 5 pm.”
The other day, when he went to a farmers’ meet, his family was on the edge till he returned home around 1 am.
This is Hassan district, the ground zero of human-elephant conflict in Karnataka.
In December last year, farmers here, including Shashidhar, staged a week-long agitation against crop damage by elephants.
The predominantly coffee-growing region, also the pocket borough of former prime minister HD Deve Gowda, is often in the news for human-elephant conflicts. A loss of human life due to elephants triggers highway blockades and demands for the capture of the animal. There are nearly 35 wild elephants in just three taluks of Hassan, including Sakaleshpur.
Between 2013 and 2014, 22 wild elephants were captured from this area in one of the largest operations of its kind based on the Karnataka Elephant Task Force’s recommendations to the Karnataka High Court.
Even today, when someone dies in an elephant encounter, the demand for capturing the animals resurfaces. Under pressure, the state forest department catches one or two elephants, though these may not be the ones that caused the death. The situation then eases till the next crop damage, injury or death caused by elephants.
Karnataka has the highest number of wild elephants in the country, numbering more than 6,000.
But human-elephant conflict is not restricted to this state. From 2015 to December 31, 2018, 1,713 people and 373 elephants died due to these conflicts in different states, the environment, forests and climate change ministry told Parliament in February. West Bengal saw the most number of human deaths at 307, followed by Odisha with 305 deaths. A fews days back, in Bihar’s Supaul district, five people were reportedly killed after a wild elephant rampaged through several villages.
India is home to most of the Asiatic elephants and rising incidents of conflicts have become a source of worry for governments, conservationists and people living close to the wild animals. Loss of natural habitat and fragmentation have been bringing wild elephants closer to human habitations, sparking these conflicts.
“In the 1980s, the estimate was that elephants were killing around 100 people a year. Now, it is over 400. There is no doubt conflicts are increasing,” says Ajay Desai, a wildlife scientist, who has been on various government panels on elephants, and is a consultant with the World Wildlife Fund.
There are also region-specific variations. Southern Bengal is a classic case of how the problem was allowed to grow, he says.
Elephants in the 200-square-km Dalma sanctuary near Jamshedpur kept moving to nearly villages where there was paddy, despite being chased away by villagers. Their area of movement also began expanding. Around the same time in the early 1990s, a forestry programme in Bengal unwittingly offered shelter to these elephants, making the region a host to a resident elephant population along with a migrant elephant population.
Aritra Kshettry, a wildlife scientist working in northern Bengal, says that since the area’s landscape is fragmented, elephants move between one region and another to fulfil their ecological needs, increasing the frequency of run-ins with people.
“This is also a tribal belt, and alcoholism is rampant. Based on my research, more than 80% of those who died after an encounter with elephants were inebriated and trying to away chase the animals. The situation is said to be similar in Odisha and Jharkhand,” Kshettry told ET Magazine.
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