Territorial wars: Man vs elephant
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COMMENTS 
The man-animal conflict in five districts of Orissa has taken 195 human and 98 elephant lives in just five years. What has gone wrong?
When the trees in the forests shed their leaves but the paddy ripens to gold, that is the time of year when men and mighty elephant herds fight over resources and space in Orissa. Keonjhar, Dhenkanal, Sundargarh, Sambalpur and Khurda are the districts where the man-animal conflict has been spiralling over the last decade. With the fallout as high as 195 human (not counting 30 injured) and 98 elephant deaths over the last five years alone and the elephant population dwindling from 2026 in 1979 to 1840 at current count, it is time to ask whether it is ecology management which has gone wrong or something more fundamental like human avarice.
The government machinery at least is not taxing itself on untangling that question, though it has lost no time in declaring its helplessness. It has issued a public warning, something it usually does prior to anticipated natural calamities, exhorting people in the endangered villages not to venture out of their houses and to keep children, the physically handicapped and the aged within their four walls, particularly after dusk. The warning also asks the inhabitants not to store old rice, or any local brew. Even more surprising is its suggestions that farmers refrain in future from growing banana, sugarcane, jackfruit, mangoes, even paddy, the staple crop in the state!As a counter-measure, Orissa's forest officials are calling for more protected areas in addition to the 18 wildlife sanctuaries and two national parks which cover 8019.12 sq km of forest area out of the state's total forest area of 52,477 sq km. Of the three elephant sanctuaries, the situation at the Chandaka Elephant Sanctuary on the fringes of the state capital of Orissa says loud and clear that this is not the solution.
Human encroachment
Just 20 km from the heart of Bhubaneswar is the city's green lung -- the Chandaka Elephant Sanctuary, sprawling over 193.31 acres of forest of now-reducing density. Declared a sanctuary in 1981, the 55 elephant-strong habitat was at a safe distance from human settlements. Today, 60 teeming villages have grown on the Bhubaneswar side of its peripheries.
All over Asia, these big mammals, more than any other animal, compete with man over habitat .The relationship of the two is traditionally one of affection and respect with a few accidental deaths on either side. The question troubling wildlife lovers and government alike is: why have the normally peaceable creatures turned marauders of late?
No protection
The problem seems to be that instead of reinforcing the territorial dividing line, today there is little or no effective protection for human settlements which are virtually overlapping the fringes of the elephant habitat.
Over the last few years, thanks to a lack of funds, the original 120 watchguards have been reduced to just 20-odd men manning the 175 sq km sanctuary with, unbelievably, only batons. Watch personnel reveal that Rangers, who head the sanctuary watchforce hierarchy, have not been provided with the mandatory motorcycles, and Foresters, a rung below, have neither cycles nor torchlights. In an emergency, mobility is provided by two jeeps -- if they are available, that is. It's a field day for pilferers and timber smugglers who, armed with AK-47s, are growing bolder by the day. The original 80 km of solar-powered electric fencing has been stolen; thoroughfares, wide enough for bullock-carts, have been bridged at numerous points of the 3 metres deep, 64 km stretch of protection trench line .The villagers access the elephant habitat to graze their cattle, collect cartloads of fodder and firewood.
Unfortunately now, the elephants too have begun to use these very illegal passages to visit the villagers and their ripening paddy and sugarcane fields, even their country liquor brewing addas!
The forest department used to get an annual grant to cultivate the above favourites inside the sanctuary in autumn, when the elephants' staple diet -- the bamboo -- sheds its leaves. This ensured that the herds do not raid the crops of the villagers. The latter, however, allege that the grant was rarely utilised for the purpose.
In fact the danger zone has now been identified as the 1188.18 hectares of reclaimed land greened under the city plantation scheme -- a strip that divides the sanctuary into two parts and is near the human colonies. Villagers slyly plant cash crops, mostly brinjal, on this strip and the elephants park themselves there for days on end; the people live in constant terror because their houses are only a trunk's distance away.
It is not as if humans are crowding in on the pachyderms only from the outside; there still exist, 22 years after the area has been declared a protected wildlife sanctuary, five villages inside the Chandaka sanctuary, with a population of more than 2,500. Although houses and cultivation lands have been readied for their resettlement near Nandankanan, the district administration has not been able to oust them. The point of contention is the inhabitants declaring they are original tribals while the administration trashes that claim saying they are nothing but squatters.
Scarce resources
Wildlife activists point out that the animal to resource ratio in Chandaka is hopelessly loaded against the elephants. Wildlife officials agree. They explain that earlier, some of the herds migrated periodically through the Mahanadi River to the Athagarh forests. Elephants need at least 300 km area for their seasonal migrations. The forest corridors through which the herds moved to their new habitat now have numerous human settlements, which disrupts their migration, forcing them to head for the villages.
The 1999 cyclonic devastation, rampant timber smuggling and deforestation for other purposes have only aggravated the crisis. An adult elephant requires up to two quintals of fodder daily.
Elephants at the receiving end
Over the last five years, unofficially, it is said that eight elephants have been electrocuted. Villagers who individually can lose up to 3 acres of ripening crop can get desperate when they lose these year after year and no government compensation is forthcoming. They pull live wire boundaries around their ready-to-harvest crops. Often the huge interlopers, injured grievously by the attacking spears of villagers, suffer in the forests for months. Wildlife experts say that elephants, by nature peaceable, will turn violent when continually disturbed by man's activities inside their habitat. The state government is supposed to pay Rs 10,000 for loss of life and Rs 500 for loss of crop by elephants .The total compensation amount payable to the villagers near Chandaka has mounted over the years to approximately Rs 26 lakh. Not much of this, according to villagers, has yet been paid to the victims. Proposals had been submitted for strategic long-term steps to deal with this crisis at the sanctuary, which include schemes to provide alternative means of livelihood for the villagers so that they would not access the forests. Years ago, when elephants were sighted near the villages, men and women would blow conch shells and with loud ululations see off the elephants, who they believed were Goddess Laxmi's carriers. Today the herds turn a deaf ear to the howling crowds, the din of tin cans or firecrackers; they have got used to it all. There is a rising desperation and ire among affected villagers in the five districts. If the government will do nothing for their safety, they will look after themselves, they resolve. The targets of their rising anger are now the elephants.
(Manipadma Jena is a Bhubaneswar-based journalist.)
InfoChange News & Features, December 2003