10 October 2018

India has the world’s largest population of wild Asian elephants. It also has a colossal human-animal conflict problem.

When award-winning conservationist Prerna Singh Bindra is asked what comes to mind when she thinks about elephants in India, she says it’s no longer wild herds wandering the vast Terai region or ambling across the rolling Nilgiri Hills. Instead she thinks of trapped, chased and dying herds.

She thinks of the Numaligarh makhna, an elephant so perplexed by the wall erected along his traditional route in Assam that he tried to bring it down and died of a brain hemorrhage. Or the Athgarh herd, islanded in a mosaic of villages and fields in Odisha, and subjected to the taunts of mobs of drunken men each evening. She thinks of the Dharamjaigarh mother and unborn calf, who hit the ground with the impact of an earthquake, after she was electrocuted by high-voltage wires strung across a field in Chhattisgarh.

When Bindra thinks about elephant watching, it’s no longer of mornings spent on safari, marvelling at the mammoth beasts engaged in play and social interactions.

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