Bandhavgarh Elephant Deaths: MP Govt Needs a Lot More Hand-holding by the Centre

According to government data, India lost 528 elephants in the last five years due to unnatural causes.

An elephant calf being rescued by forest department personnel, using elephants, after it wandered away following the reported death of its mother along with nine other elephants in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve of Madhya Pradesh in Umaria on November 6, 2024.

(Photo: PTI)

The elephants in Bandhavgarh National Park in Madhya Pradesh seem to be nobody’s baby. The suspicious poisoning of ten of them in the park has sparked outrage and concern.

The state government of Madhya Pradesh, with hardly any knowledge of handling pachyderms, is clueless after the death of 10 elephants — four on 29 October, followed by four more the next day, and two deaths on 31 October. Except for one, all those who died were females, and three of them were pregnant. They would have delivered any time next month, a senior official informed.

These elephants were part of a 13-member herd. In alleged retaliation, one of the surviving elephants of the herd killed two villages and injured one badly.

The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), it appears, has not provided enough financial and technical assistance to the state after its inclusion in Project Elephant (PE), a national-level elephant conservation programme on the lines of Project Tiger. This project was launched in 1992. It has always faced a resource crunch, and after the merger of Project Tiger and Project Elephant last year, the funds were squeezed further.

Without waiting for the post-mortem report, state officials attributed the deaths to “toxins in the Kodo millet” allegedly consumed by the elephants in Salkhania village in the Khitauli range of the park.

In a statement, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) Vijay N Ambade said the deaths could have been caused by “mycotoxins associated with Kodo millet.” After some outrage, the state government suspended the field director, who was on leave to look after her ailing mother, and an assistant conservator of the forest posted in the park.

Villagers claimed that the roars of the elephants reverberated through the jungle for days before their deaths. In the morning, they informed the local officials. “Some senior officials did reach the spot but without veterinarians”, Banti Singh, a villager, told The Quint. “Elephants kept dying for three days but were helpless.”

One of the villagers, Sudama Singh, a Gond tribal from Salkhania, added, “Our cattle eat the same Kodo millet, but nothing happened to them. They did not even vomit.” Ratan Singh, another villager said, “We have been eating Kodo for a long time and it is like amrit for us. Elephants cannot die from eating Kodo. Their deaths should be investigated properly.”

Madhya Pradesh is, in fact, promoting its cultivation of Kodo in tribal areas. The state is one of the largest producers of the crop, according to a 2020 research paper.

Till 2018, elephants were not found in Madhya Pradesh. As many as 40 elephants migrated from neighbouring Chattisgarh and Jharkhand. They are now residents of Bandhavgarh, and their number has swelled to over 60. Additionally, the elephant movement has continued in Anuppur, Shahdol, and Umaria districts (where Bandhavgarh is located). Elephants have also been spotted near Kanha National Park, spread over Mandla, Dindori, and Balaghat districts.

A senior official with the MoEFCC said that the elephants are migrating up to the jungles of Maharashtra. “We need to learn to live with them. We also need to develop a mechanism within which the villagers are informed on time about their arrival and movement to minimise the damage to human lives.“

He added that the elephants also act as crop raiders and states should have a proper policy to compensate for the loss of damage to property and crops. Madhya Pradesh, he concluded, doesn’t seem to have a proper policy to compensate villagers for the loss of crops and property by elephants.

A senior official involved with Project Elephant told The Quint, “We have assisted Madhya Pradesh with a proper technical policy to handle the elephants. It was submitted in March this year.”

A project to radio collar some wild elephants has been pending for over two years, said a state government official, adding the Wildlife Institute of India must implement the project soon. This would have helped in tracking the animals.

Like the big cats, the elephant is also facing a huge loss of habitat. As urbanisation, industrial development, and agricultural expansion increase in countries like India and Indonesia, the habitat of the Asian elephant (elephas maximus) is shrinking rapidly, leading to increasingly isolated populations and a rising number of deadly human-elephant conflicts.

In 2022, an elephant carcass was spotted near the Panpatha range of the park but it was burnt inside the park without any investigations.

The Data

Asian elephants are more endangered than their African cousins. The biggest threat to their survival isn’t poaching but habitat loss. With less than 50,000 living in the wild, mostly in Southeast Asia, more than 50 percent are in India, where their range is the largest.

The government informed the Lok Sabha in July this year that India lost 528 elephants in the last five years due to unnatural causes, including poaching, poisoning, electrocution, and train accidents. The data also revealed that the human-elephant conflict resulted in 2,853 human deaths in India over the last five years, with the number of fatalities reaching a five-year high of 628 in 2023.

Union Minister of State for Environment Kirti Vardhan Singh told the House that 392 elephants died from electrocution and 73 were killed in train accidents during this period. Fifty elephants were killed by poachers, and 13 succumbed to poisoning, he added.

According to the last elephant census conducted in 2017, India has 29,964 elephants, which is around 60 percent of their global population. Elephants caused 587 human deaths in 2019, 471 in 2020, 557 in 2021, 610 in 2022, and 628 in 2023.

Interestingly, almost three decades after Project Elephant was launched in February 1992, in June 2022, the MoEFCC issued guidelines to states and union territories on managing human-wildlife conflicts, including damage to crops. The minister told the house these guidelines promote the cultivation of crops in fringe areas that are unpalatable to wild animals and the use of agroforestry models incorporating cash crops, such as chillies, lemongrass, and khus grass, mixed with tree and shrub species.

For the past few years, Madhya Pradesh has been facing a crisis of leadership in the forest department, especially in the wildlife wing. It did not have a strong chief wildlife warden(CWLW). For a long time, there was no full-time CWLW. Clearly, the state government still needs a lot of handholding from the MoEFCC to protect the majestic animal revered as Lord Ganesha.

(The author is a senior journalist based in Madhya Pradesh. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)