Front line of war with elephants

Early warnings on display boards are effective to reduce encounters

HEGGOVE, India - On the day Yogesh became another of the dozens of Indians trampled to death each year, the coffee plantation worker knew from the firecrackers set off nearby that danger was at hand.

"Everything happened so fast. The elephant suddenly emerged from behind the bushes, trampled him and disappeared," said his younger brother Girish.

The 48-year-old from the southern state of Karnataka, home to India's largest elephant population with more than 6,000 jumbos, 20 percent of the nation's total, left behind a wife and two children.

As India's 1.3-billion population grows, people are encroaching into habitats where until now the elephant, not man, has been king, with painful effects for both parties.

The Indian government told parliament last year that 1,100 people had been killed in the previous three years.

The elephants too are paying a heavy price with around 700 fatalities across the nation in the past eight years.

Most were killed by electric fences, poisoned or shot by locals angry at family members being killed or crops being destroyed, and accidents on railways cutting through ancient migratory routes.

The Indian government appears undecided about what is the best to do.

"It is very difficult to escape our population or development pressure," a senior government official said on anonymity. "Unless it's addressed, all of us just have to learn to live with the reality of such encounters."

In Karnataka, forest rangers, mounted on elephants themselves, capture problem pachyderms, of which there are more and more, and take them to the Dubare Elephant Camp.

J.C. Bhaskar, an employee at the camp, describes it like "a jail" but it is more of a rehabilitation and training center.

One of the inmates is none other than Surya, who killed Yogesh and another man, the lumbering animal wearing chains loosely around one ankle to discourage him from running.

Broken fences

However, while such relocations may assuage local anger, officials and activists acknowledge it is only a stopgap solution.

The only effective method, according to Vinod Krishnan, an activist with a NGO working with local communities, is better information-sharing.

"Everything else has already been tried unsuccessfully. This includes deep trenches, normal or solar-powered fences and even firecrackers," Krishnan said.

His group has developed a simple but effective system around local villages allowing sightings of elephants to be immediately verified and passed on. "We set up display boards around key elephant routes and set up SMS services for early warnings about an elephant's presence, which has significantly reduced such chance encounters," he said.

Agence France-Presse