Elephants’ love for liquor takes a heavy toll on human life

Patna: Elephants’ love for alcohol has resulted in alarming rise in attacks on human population in recent months, prompting the authorities to advise them against storing intoxicants at home.

The tribal villagers in Jharkhand have been surviving by brewing liquor from mahua, a forest product used for preparing liquor at home and available in plenty in the nearby forests.

But villagers’ move to store these intoxicating stuff at home is now proving costlier as the rampaging elephants too have now developed a taste for these for this locally-made alcohol, villagers and officials said.

The desperate tuskers are now attacking villages and damaging homes after smelling scents of this alcohol wafting through the air in the jungle which is their homes. Unable to find them, the elephants either eat away the grains stored in the homes or kill the villagers, reports said.

Officials say that is one bad habit of the tusker which they have picked up from the local villagers who are addicted to locally-made liquor available at low price. “They (elephants) can go to any extent and wreak havoc for liquor,” said another forest official.

On Saturday morning again, a herd of some 15 elephants attakced a village in Jharkhand’s Simdega block and damaged five homes before eating away grains stored there. They also trampled one woman to death while other villagers managed to escape after listening to the alarms.

Soon after getting the information, a team of forest officials rushed to the spot and asked the villages to be cautious from the herds of animals. They also advised the villagers against storing raw materials used for preparing liquor at home. “You should avoid storing intoxicants or raw materials, such as mahua (Madhuca longifolia) used for brewing liquor at home as the elephants easily get attracted to them,” a forest official Binod Kumar told the villagers.

In December again, a herd of 22 elephants raided many villages in three districts of Jharkhand and killed five villagers. According to an official reports, more than 1,000 people have been killed by the herds of elephant since the state was carved out of Bihar in November 2000.

Apart from their love for liquor, officials cite the depleting forest cover and shortage of their food behind the increasing man-animal conflicts. Experts say the elephants normally require around 500km of home range to hunt for food and consume 250kg of food and 150 litres of water a day for which they migrate from one corner to another.

But what is serious, the human population is rather encroaching into elephants’ habitats as they battle hard for food, resulting in attacks on villagers’ homes.

Alarmed at the prevailing situation, the authorities are now working on a plan to develop a green wall outside the human population by planting huge number of trees and arrange for their food and water in the forest itself to prevent them intruding into the human’s populace. Their focus is on making large number of bamboo plantation.

“We can’t claim to give a permanent solution to the problem yet we are doing something which could check cases of elephants-men conflicts. In order to achieve this task, we are increasing green cover of bamboo trees and arranging for their water in the forest itself,” Jharkhand’s principal chief conservator of forests Sanjay Kumar told the local media.

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India's economic boom is killing elephants: Coordination at all levels is key to keeping pachyderms safe

Even as India makes giant strides to upgrade its economy and infrastructure at breakneck speed, it is the environment that's paying the price particularly its wild animals. The elephant is no different as hordes of them die in different circumstances as the burgeoning human population and the facilities they use shrink the space for elephants.

On 15 November, an elephant died after coming in contact with a high tension powerline at Sansaraposi village in Mayurbhanj district’s of Odisha. The sad news comes in just after a few days of a similar incident which claimed lives of seven pachyderms in the state. On 26 October, a herd of seven elephants was moving towards a canal from a nearby paddy field when it came in contact of a sagging 11-KV power line in the Dhenkanal forest range. This was the highest casualty of elephants reported in a single incident.

While fingers are often pointed at the forest department, the onus of this kind of incidents doesn’t lie with it alone. The failure of the power department to act despite several reminders from the forest department to fix a hanging transmission line cannot be ignored here. As per the Indian Electricity Rules (1956) and Rule 58 of Central Electricity Authority’s Regulations 2010, the height of overhead line should be no less than 4.6 meters and for high voltage lines over 11,000 volts, it should be 5.2 meters. The average height at the shoulder of an Indian or Asian elephant is between 2 to 3.5 metres. Had the power department responded to the call with alacrity such a tragic outcome could have been prevented.

Biswajit Mohanty of Wildlife Society of Odisha is extremely upset with these deaths. He said, “We have done various surveys before the October incident and have written several letters to the power department about the sagging power line in Dhenkanal district. But it was of no use. The electrical company (CESU) is not working in compliance with the Indian Electricity Rules (1956). Last Sunday also, we have done a survey and still there are a lot of sagging lines which can become a reason for another accident in the district."

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