As elephants kill in Assam, blame on ‘Laden’

Around 3.30 am on June 1, at village Patpara Pahartoli, adjacent to a forest area in Assam’s Goalpara district, Manoj Hajong (25) and his brother Bidyadhar Hajong (28) were woken up by shouts that there was an elephant outside their hut.

The Hajong brothers rushed outside to see a lone elephant, about 9 feet in height and without a tusk, walking away after eating the rice crop kept in the verandah of the hut.

Manoj, a driver by profession, sprinted behind the elephant to chase it away, Bidyadhar on his toes. At the same time, three young neighbours of the Hajongs — armed with sticks which held lit jute twines — ran towards the elephant from the other side.

Trapped, the furious elephant turned, let out a cry and sprang towards Manoj. It threw Manoj to the ground, crushed him and went off towards the forest. Bidyadhar ran out of its way.

“I saw Manoj die… what could I do? It was ‘Laden’. Had I tried to do anything which offended the giant, I would not have been alive today. We call it ‘Laden’ because people get paralysed with fear when they see him attacking,” says Bidyadhar, who is a farmer.

The elephant he is talking about is around the same age, and Goalpara district’s only loner elephant. Over two years and the 300 sq km of forest area he is rumoured to operate in, ‘Laden’ is accused of killing several people and damaging huts. Villagers in the affected areas do not know much about Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda. What they do know is that ‘Laden’ stands for “someone who scares”.

Since 2016, Goalpara district officials have attributed 20-25 deaths to elephant trampling. This year, they have listed eight. Every other day in the past few weeks, ‘Laden’ has hit the headlines in the local press for his “atrocities”.

But several forest and district administration officials as well as experts say it is unlikey ‘Laden’ is responsible for all he is accused of. “No doubt this elephant has killed people, but so have elephants in herds. He is targeted by public because his atrocities are prominent,” says Goalpara Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) A Goswami.


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Rouge tusker tramples 43-yr-old tribal man to death

Udhagamandalam: A 43-year-old tribal man was trampled to death by a rogue tusker while grazing buffaloes close to Chemmanarai tribal hamlet in the Kotagiri division of forests here on Wednesday evening.The deceased was identified as D Mahalingam, a resident of Chemmanarai.

According to police, Mahalingam had on Wednesday gone out to a private land close to his village to graze buffaloes.

A tusker, meanwhile, strayed into the area and suddenly attacked him.“The elephant smashed Mahalingam’s head, killing him on the spot,” Srinivasan, Kotagiri forest range officer, told TOI.

“Elepant movements were never reported in Chemmanarai area.

The tusker might have strayed into the habitat in search of water,” he added.Hearing the elephant trumpeting, local residents informed forest officials, who reached the spot immediately and found the tusker roaming in the area.“We chased the elephant away into the forest and retrieved the body, which was sent to the Kotagiri government hospital,” the forest ranger said.Postmortem operation couldn’t be performed on Wednesday as the body reached the hospital only at night.

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Karnataka: A jumbo conflict zone

On World Wildlife Day, the state lost Forest Officer S Manikandan, who was Field Director of Nagarahole Tiger Reserve, after a wild elephant attacked him when he had gone to the area to assess damage caused by a mild fire.

This was just the latest and most high-profile of deaths in a state that is reeling with violent confrontations with elephants. In the last three years, at least 158 people have been killed by elephants in the state. Across India, from 16 states, 1,557 have died since 2014 and in 2017-18 (up to November), 201 people died, of which nine were from Karnataka.

Dinesh Holla, convener of Sahyadri Sanchaya, told BM, “I have been observing the Western Ghat region for several years. Due to an increase in forest encroachment, the elephant corridors are shrinking. The other reason for shrinking elephant corridors are the mafias that are into mining, hydel power plants and resorts. When the elephant does not have sufficient place to move around in its corridor, they come to the villages. Villagers have their own techniques to chase elephants away.

This is when the elephant is helpless, it has nowhere to go and when hungry and angry attacks humans.” Holla said the state government has failed to implement the Forest Act. “Acres of forest land have been encroached upon. The government only talks about compensation for attacks,” he said.

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For the first time Bengal govt to use radio collars to study tusker herds, reduce conflict with humans

Villagers chase an elephant in West Midnapore.

Archive Villagers chase an elephant in West Midnapore.

Archive To study the movement of elephant herds and possibly bring down the rising man-animal conflict in South Bengal, the state’s forest and wildlife department will, in a first, use radio collars on tuskers in the region.

Because of the considerable population of elephants in West Midnapore, the department has chosen the district to initiate the pilot project. Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Chief Wildlife Warden, West Bengal, Ravi Kant Sinha said, “This will be the first time radio collars are used on elephants in the state.

The project was supposed to have been initiated ten days ago, but it was temporarily put on hold because of the search for the tiger which had recently surfaced in Lalgarh, the first sighting in the area in a century.

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