Bandhavgarh Forests Get a Trunk Call in Elephant-Less Madhya Pradesh

For the first time, Bandhavgarh reserve forest in Madhya Pradesh has a colony of elephants – the same herd of about 40 animals that arrived at the sanctuary around this time last year, and has stayed on.

This, experts say, is an unusual occurrence in Bandhavgarh, which has, over the years, played host to herds of elephants that arrive to graze and forage and subsequently travel back to neighbouring Chhattisgarh.

EXPLAINED

A case of migration

While India is home to 50 per cent of the Asian elephant population, and according to 2017 elephant census there are 27,312 elephants in the country – a decrease, however, of nearly 3,000 from the 2012 census – there are no elephants in Madhya Pradesh. There is no known reason for this disappearance from India’s central region, including MP and until a few years ago Chhattisgarh, but experts say a loss of habitat could have led to this. But growing urbanisation and deforestation in other elephants areas, such as west Bengal and Jharkhand, could now be pushing the animals westwards.

Elephant experts now say the development is a sign not only of a rise in elephant numbers in the country, and the fact that they are travelling, but also that they can thrive at a place given the right conditions.

Pointing out that this is the first time in centuries that MP has had elephants, Bandhavgarh National Park deputy director Sidharth Gupta said, “This herd arrived in December 2018. The fact that the herd has stayed on is highly unusual. We have never had wild elephants reside here before. But Bandhavgarh is a large reserve forest – they have plenty of food and water here, and we believe that this is why they stayed on.”

He said while the reserve has received no new funds for the elephants, certain measures have been taken. “Since this is not an elephant area, we were not trained in handling elephants. So we have had elephant experts and wildlife officials from West Bengal and Chhattisgarh to come and train our staff,” Gupta said. “We have deputed patrolling teams and are monitoring the elephants round the clock. We have conducted awareness and sensitisation campaigns in surrounding villages so that the locals are aware and we can control the man-elephant conflict, if there arises any.”

So far, Gupta added, there has been no reports of a conflict. He explained that there are barely 50 villages around the 1,536-sq km national park, reducing the possibility of conflict between the inhabitants and the elephants, especially when the animals stray into agricultural fields and destroy standing crops, Gupta said.

In October this year, the Union Ministry for Environment, Forests and Climate Change constituted a technical committee to develop a National Elephant Action Plan. Committee member Bivash Pandav, who also works for the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in Chhattisgarh and is currently tracking several herds in the state, including the one now settled at Bandhavgarh, said, “When they (herd of elephants) migrated to Bandhavgarh, we kept expecting them to return, but they did not.”

Giving an example from Surguja, in north Chhattisgarh, not far from the MP boundary, Pandav said there were elephants in that area earlier. “There are records of this, and even records of elephants being either hunted or captured and presented to Mughal emperors from Surguja. But in the 1920s, they disappeared entirely for unknown reasons. Then they reappeared in the late-1990s and early-2000s. Today, there are 250 elephants in north Chhattisgarh that have mostly come from Odisha and Jharkhand,” he said.

Qamar Qureshi of WII said migrating elephants is now a country-wide trend, with the animals moving from South India to North India, and from the country’s east towards the west. “The source population is increasing, so the animals are migrating. Tiger and elephant ranges in the country are also expanding,” he said.

Pandav said, “The herd that has gone to Bandhavgarh and decided to settle there is an extremely interesting study for us. It is now obvious that if given a healthy habitat, elephants will stay put at a place. This is something that needs to be replicated in Chhattisgarh and other elephant areas.”

Within Chhattisgarh, Pandav said, elephants keep travelling from one place to another, before being hounded out by villagers who are trying to save their crops. Although there is extensive forest cove, it is often patchy and elephants in Chhattisgarh rely on crops a lot, so the human-elephant conflict here becomes inevitable.

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Source: IE

Image Courtesy: First Post

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