In Coimbatore forests, work on to bring down human-animal conflict (India)

Author(s)

V. S. Palaniappan, The Hindu

Date Published

The Coimbatore Forest Division recorded the highest number of 99 deaths due to human-animal conflict during the 2004-2014 period.

The figure was a meagre 23 during the previous decade.

Till October 28 this year, five persons had been killed in elephant raids.

Stung by the increasing trend, the Forest Department joined hands with Osai, a non-governmental organisation involved in nature and wildlife conservation, and studied every case of death using 25 parameters to compile a database, K. Kalidasan, president of Osai, says. The data thus generated would be of help in assessing the conflict pattern, the root cause for such conflicts and remedial measures that could be initiated to prevent deaths.

The study will bring out a zoning exercise — identifying the pockets that witness a high rate of conflict, the season of conflict, the time of conflict, the age of the victims and the state of the victims at the time of death, M. Senthil Kumar, District Forest Officer, says.

These data will come in handy for revisiting wildlife management and conflict mitigation preparedness of the Forest Department, he says.

The Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve has the single largest population of Asian elephants in the world. The Coimbatore Forest Division is a bridge between the Silent Valley and Mannarkad parts of the Reserve and Sathyamangalam, Mudumalai and Bandipur.

Wild elephants need a proper habitat, traditional migratory paths and corridors. To meet their food and water needs, they require large home range. Scarcity of food and water, besides obstructions in their corridor and enhanced human interference in habitats, could make elephants stray into human habitats. Crops such as maize, plantain and sugarcane attract elephants.

To mitigate the reasons for conflict, the Forest Department had created close to 40 water troughs — seven or eight are being added every year. Rather than waiting for rain, solar-powered pumps have been installed to draw water from nearby rivulets to fill the troughs.

The Coimbatore Division is spread over 690 sq.km and six ranges and has a 260-km forest boundary. Ninety per cent of it is conflict-prone, with as many as 152 villages identified as the worst affected.

Ninety-five per cent of the forest boundary has already been covered with elephant-proof trenches, Mr. Senthil Kumar says. In each of the six ranges, the department is into its third year of creating 45 hectares of a fodder reserve in a bid to address one of the causative factors, he adds.

The elephants use traditional migratory paths to move from one habitat to the other. The entire 260-km length acts as a corridor, except the Mulli and the Anaikatti region. Unfortunately, many private patta lands come in the way of the elephant corridors and migratory paths.

The development activities in the past decade and a half in the patta lands have disturbed the elephant movement. So the elephants have come out of their traditional paths to human habitats and agricultural land.

Unfortunately, Coimbatore has become one of the high conflict zones in the nation, Mr. Kalidasan says.

In Tamil Nadu there are no proper records about corridors. Now the process to identify the corridors has commenced. There is no act to control the activities that disturb the corridors and migratory paths on patta lands. It is an urgent need. Now we have only HACA, which is a toothless authority, Mr. Kalidasan says.