The mandarins at the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests are a worried lot these days. And, for once it is not vanishing tigers or birds that are the cause of concern. Rather, it is a group of vanishing professionals ? the highly-skilled mahuts ? that has the babus worried, reports Chetan Chauhan.
The mandarins at the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests are a worried lot these days. And, for once it is not vanishing tigers or birds that are the cause of concern. Rather, it is a group of vanishing professionals — the highly-skilled mahuts — that has the babus worried.
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The number of mahouts (elephant riders-cum-caretaker) are on a steady decline across the country. A rough estimate says there are over 4,000 elephants in zoos, temples or circuses, but not enough mahouts to tend to them.
Traditionally, some villages in Bihar, Assam, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu used to provide skilled mahouts. During the golden era of zamindars and kings, the mahout’s was a lucrative profession. But the scenario has changed completely.
“With passage of time, these villages have stopped producing the elephant riders any more resulting in a huge shortage,” said AN Prasad, Director, Project Elephant.
And the first victims of the shortage are the elephants. “We have observed that the health of elephants in captive areas is declining and their death rate is higher than the ones in the 25 elephant reserves,” Prasad said.
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To correct the imbalance, the ministry has decided to build a training ground for mahuts in Haryana. “We have already sanctioned Rs 50 lakh for the project,” he said. A first of its kind, the centre will train mahouts from different parts of the country to be re-employed in captive breeding areas of elephants. It will be built on an 20 acre- plot near the Haryana-UP border and will also keep old elephants.
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To correct the imbalance, the ministry has decided to build a training ground for mahuts in Haryana. “We have already sanctioned Rs 50 lakh for the project,” he said. A first of its kind, the centre will train mahouts from different parts of the country to be re-employed in captive breeding areas of elephants. It will be built on an 20 acre- plot near the Haryana-UP border and will also keep old elephants.
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.
