Asia Sentinel

Encroaching human population, fast-moving trains cut pachyderms' numbers

India’s elephants, as much as tigers the country’s symbol, are dying in ever-greater numbers as industrialization, deforestation, the pressure of human settlement and shrinking food resources cut into their numbers.

Although the world's concern has risen over the fate of India's tigers, the descending numbers of India's elephants have not caused alarm. They are not listed as endangered species. The Federal Ministry of Environment and Forests estimated the population of wild elephants at 26,413 in 2002, the last figure available. Although officials say the population has risen, the World Wildlife Fund believes that India’s elephant population has fallen by 50 percent over the last two decades. Statistical estimation on either tigers or elephants is not sound.

Obviously, as man encroaches, the elephant population faces problems, not least because they love to break into human settlements and poach not only crops but vats of homemade liquor. An Indian elephant needs some 500 square miles to roam, consumes 250 kilograms of leaves and wild fruits and drinks as much as 180 liters of water a day. Indiscriminate felling of trees and development projects cuts their habitat. Although the federal government has written and passed laws, implementation is in the hands of state governments, which often look the other way when poachers strike.

There is nowhere that this devastation is hitting harder than the northern fringe of West Bengal on the Assam border, where a pervasive despair overwhelms Ram Singh Thapa, a trained Nepali wildlife tourist guide at Gorumara Forest in Dooars, the tea estate-dominated region of West Bengal. So for far this year, 51 of the beasts have been killed in the area along the West Bengal-Assam border, 31 of them due to collisions with trains. By contrast, in the 34 years from 1974 to 2008, only 36 had died from trains. But the pachyderms were accustomed to relatively slow-moving trains on meter-gauge rails, not those on the broad-gauge trains that have replaced them and which run at upwards of 100 km per hour.

Also, says Dr Sheelant Patel, the chief conservator of forests in North Bengal, the animals had previously learned to time their crossings against train schedules. But freight trains, which don’t run on fixed schedules, appear to confuse them. Although the state forest department has repeatedly asked the North Eastern Frontier Railway to lower the speed of their trains, they haven’t done so, she says.

Rajen Pradhan, a village council official at Malbazar, representing the Communist Party of India, is more critical. "This is an unpardonable cruelty on innocent animals,” he says. “They may take time to adjust their walking pace with the fast-moving trains. Till then, train-drivers should be mandated to control train speeds. Unfortunately, the NFR higher-ups bother little for regulating speeds of moving trains along the elephant corridors.”

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written by Kay , December 09, 2008

This is unforgivable cruelty to such helpless creatures.

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