All’s well on elephant front

The environment ministry’s latest census on elephant population in India reveals that its number has increased by 1,367 in the last five years, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Feb 26, 2008, 03:06:32 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

All is not bad with the Indian wildlife. The country has witnessed an increase in elephant population between 2002 and 2007, despite the big animal getting killed by poachers or during man-animal conflict or in accidents. This comes after the dwindling tiger population figures of 3,642 in 2001 to 1,411 in 2007.

The environment ministry’s latest census on elephant population in India reveals that its number has increased by 1,367 in the last five years. The census figures are for entire the country except northeast, where the elephant census is still going on. Result of census from northeast is expected in March.

But, elephant experts like Dr RK Singh of Wildlife Trust of India, are skeptical about the projected increase in population. “The increase may be because of same elephants being counted in two different states. There is no mechanism to prevent this duplication,” he said. Environment ministry officials, however, said the aspect of duplication has been considered in the census methodology.

The increase in population may be good news for wildlife watchers but it may spell doom for villages around the elephant habitats. The last few yeas have witnessed numerous cases of elephants attacking villages and destroying farmland falling in their natural corridor of movement. “With destruction of natural corridors, the elephants are forced to venture out. And when such a big animal moves the crops are destroyed. This has happened because their natural corridors have got fragmented,” explained Ravi Chellam, an environmentalist, who was earlier working with United Nations Development Fund.

Singh said such man-animal conflict incidents are bound to increase in future if the government fails to restore the elephant’s natural habitats.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

Check India news real-time updates, latest news on Hindustan Times and more across India.