Yet another resident was knocked down by the elephants at a village in Barjora in the last midnight hours. The resident was the second victim in 48 hours in the forest range area. On Tuesday, a pair of migrating Dalma elephants had intruded into a house at Gopbandhi village in Barjora forest range area and knocked down an elderly man Shambhunath Mondal (72), who had just come out from his concrete house.
At Haricharandanga, in the same Barjora range, four elephants of the same migrating herd attacked 24-year-old Mamoni Ghorui in the midnight hours the moment she’d come out of her house to anwer to nature’s call. The herd dragged Mamoni about 30 feet and trampled her to death. Gangadhar Ghorui, elder brother of the deceased, said, “We woke up when my sister screamed. It was covered under dense fog and we couldn’t locate her groaning.” He added, “Soon we saw the elephants on the road.”
The Haricharandanga is located close to Saharjora forests, where 24 Dalma elephants are staying currently. After the Tuesday’s Gopbandhi incident, locals staged a protest at the range office on the plea that the forest authorities were maintaining unperturbed even though a jumbo herd of nearly 70 migratory elephants split in groups were causing inconvenience to the locals at a number of villages and killing people almost every alternate month.
Umar Imam, DFO, Bankura (north) division, said, “Very recently some of the migrating herd members have started showing aggressiveness, it seems. We’ve however beefed up surveillance.” The continued splitting of the herd, the officials in the range areas said, were causing inconvenience in tracking their movements especially in the prevailing extreme cold weather conditions