13 Aug. 2019


As we celebrated the World Elephant Day on Monday (August 12), the distressed elephants of Odisha had nothing to celebrate with their homes getting encroached for mining, farming, industries, urbanisation and their traditional paths getting cut off by irrigation canals, railway lines and mines. In 1979 there were 2,044 elephants in Odisha but the number has plunged to 1,976 with increasing number of deaths of the pachyderms.

Keonjhar district which had 112 elephants in 2002 now has only 40 losing them to large scale mining while Dhenkanal district which had 81 elephants in 2002 now has 169 with elephants moving in human habitations and damaging cornfields and orchards. They are distracted and at times trapped, unable as they are to use traditional migration routes, cut off by the Rengali irrigation canals and illegal stone quarries.

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