Human fatality due to elephant attack has logged a sharp rise in Odisha with as many as 57 reported deaths in the last three months as the man-pachyderm conflict reached a flashpoint in the State.
The man-animal conflict is on its peak in the first quarter of fiscal year- April, May, June. Apart from farm land, village raids by elephants occur all throughout the year. In the current quarter, the encounters went up sharply as humans and elephants vie for the same fruits like mango, bael and jackfruit which ripen around human habitation and inside forests too, said wildlife activist Biswajit Mohanty.
The April, May, June quarter of this year, compared to the last 9 years, has seen a 26 per cent rise in the number of human elephant encounters which resulted in more human kills and injuries than ever before – a rise of 50 per cent above the previous highest human kills of last year.
The sharp rise suggests that this year the number of human kills could end up significantly more than 146 human kills of last year. Incidentally, this quarter also happens to have recorded the highest ever Human Kills in any quarter in the last ten years.
While 93 encounters occurred in the last three months resulting in the death of 57 humans, 42 people were injured as the elephants raided the places of human habitation.
Elephants are straying out of their habitats more often due to increase in the level of disturbance caused by quarries and crushers and night movement of trucks and tractors. There is also a lack of adequate forest fodder and a marked shift towards consumption of farm crops and food grains stored inside villages, Mohanty said.
Dhenkanal, Angul, Keonjhar, Mayurbhanj, Sambalpur, Sundargarh, and Cuttack are among the most conflict prone elephant bearing districts in the State.
Dhenkanal, which topped the chart of human kills by elephant, has recorded a ten-fold jump in diversion of elephant habitat for black and laterite stone quarries, stone crushers and steel/power plants between 2011 to 2021, he alleged.
Odisha holds the dubious record of more number of human kills among all other States despite an elephant population of 1976 compared to Karnataka – 6049, Assam – 5719, Kerala – 3054, and Tamil Nadu – 2761 as per the last national level census carried out in August,2017, Mohanty concluded.