11 highlights
-
A speeding train had knocked down two members of their herd earlier that day. A three-month-old calf and her mother died on the spot. “After this, the rest of the elephants in the herd got furious and surrounded their bodies, blocking the train traffic,” a forest ranger told Hindustan Times.
-
Indian Railways has identified 194 elephant corridors under its area of operation. The CAG report inspected 77 of them and found that trains killed 61 elephants between 2016 and 2019. This is around 20 a year, up from an average of 10 a year between 2001-10.
-
The Asian elephants have been declared “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
-
Elephants mostly inhabit areas like Assam, parts of Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. But over the past 40 years, they’ve started moving beyond their known habitats.
-
In 2017, Sukumar along with Mukti Roy, his colleague from the Indian Institute of Science, conducted one such study in north Bengal, which records the highest elephant and train accidents.
-
But the most striking bit they found was: male adult elephants were three times as likely to be killed as their expected representation in the herd.
-
The researchers looked deeper into it. Eighty percent of accidents, they found, occurred between 6pm and 6am. This was the time enterprising male elephants crossed the railway tracks from forests to villages with standing crops. This also changed with time of the year. Most occurred during the harvest season of maize, in May-June, and of rice, in November.
-
Studies on other herbivores like deer and moose in other parts of the world have had similar findings: that the collisions with trains peaked during seasons where the animals moved widely in search of food. The solution thus presented itself.
-
Every time there is an elephant death, wildlife conservationists call for trains to slow down. But often, the railways has argued that speed-restriction along the entirety of vulnerable stretches is operationally unfeasible.
-
In their report, Sukumar and Roy recommended limiting the operation of trains during night-time. The elephants tended to cross tracks between 10-11pm under cover of darkness and return at 4am.
-
It also makes an additional suggestion: a periodic review of elephant passages, to identify the changes in elephant migration patterns. Doing so is important, says Sukumar, given how the elephants’ movements are changing.