Try solving this elephantine problem

Army personnel engaged in counter-insurgency operations in the state too haven’t been spared. Only last August an army jawan was trampled to death when a herd of wild elephants went on the rampage at the Mariani base camp in Jorhat district. Elephants straying out from their severely depleted habitat have even caused worry to the authorities of Guwahati’s Lokapriya Gopinath Bordoloi airport in Guwahati. And it has become almost an annual affair of wild elephants arriving in the city and causing havoc after being washed out of their forests during the flood season.

Assam, incidentally, has the highest concentration of Asian elephants, with forest officials putting the figure roughly at over 5,500. These apart, hundreds also sneak in every winter from the neighbouring states of Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, where the rate of depletion of forests is even higher. Add to this about 600 elephants that are in private possession in different districts and you get a fair idea of the numbers involved. Official statistics show that more than a 1,000 persons have fallen prey to wild elephants in the state since 1981.

“Loss of habitat and destruction of corridors are the two major problems that have prompted wild elephants to come out and cause damage to human life and property,†says Assam principal chief conservator of forests S. Doley. But then it is a fact that the efforts put in by the government to clear forests from encroachers have hardly yielded the desired result. All the traditional and natural elephant migration corridors in the Northeast are either encroached upon, or totally cut off, compelling the elephants to take routes through human settlements.

There are as many as five major elephant corridors in Assam: The Assam-Meghalaya corridor; the Kameng (Arunachal Pradesh)-Sonitpur corridor; the Dibru Saikhowa-Deomali (Arunachal) corridor; the Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong-Intangki (Nagaland) corridor, and the Manas-Bhutan-North Bengal corridor.Most of these corridors are today very badly disturbed, with the ones like the Kameng-Sonitpur corridor having almost vanished thanks to massive encroachment and the wanton felling of trees. Adding to this are development projects. The establishment of a refinery at Numaligarh has virtually cut off an important elephant corridor, lying to the northeast of Kaziranga National Park. This has, in turn, led to the large-scale destruction of human habitation that has come up along these corridors.

Efforts were on to evict encroachers from the Kameng-Sonitpur elephant corridor, but that too have come to a standstill for obvious reasons. A proposal for re-establishing the Manas-Bhutan-North Bengal corridor has also made very little headway. The big problem is the massive pressure on land in Assam, thanks to the population explosion and large-scale migration. Environmentalists have been exerting pressure on the state government to preserve the existing corridors as well as regenerate the portions lost to plantations, but such appeals have gone unheeded. Says Saumyadeep Dutta of the well-known environmental group called Nature’s Beckon,‘‘We have been pleading with the government to do something urgently, but it just doesn’t respond.’’

Says environmentalist Bibhab Kumar Talukdar,‘‘There is an urgent need to save the elephants, otherwise humankind will soon lose some of its most precious species.’’ He believes that efforts should also be made to ensure that people are made more aware of the dangers of deforestation and encroachment.

Luckily for the Northeast, the Supreme Court ban of 1996 on felling timber has helped in stopping destruction of the forests to some extent. But, sadly, there has been very little done to throw out encroachers. In the world-famous Kaziranga National Park, for instance, the authorities have been able to clear two patches of forest land, but in three other patches, petty political interests have ensured that the forest mafia are allowed to continue their operations without a threat. It’s truly an elephantine problem that Assam is landed with!