IN CONVERSATION
Jumbo tales
ANTARA DAS
|
Dhritikanto Lahiri Chowdhury’s book on elephants throws light on these giants of the wild.
|
Photo: K. Ananthan
Wildlife corridors: People are moving into their usual routes.
HARJIT was a lover of food. Throughout his life, matters gastronomic always determined the pace and rhythm of his daily existence. Till the day his uncontrolled gluttony proved to be his undoing; he was put to sleep for possessing an appetite too big
for his own good. Harjit, the elephant, who once shocked locals by emerging from a store enveloped in a thick, white sheet of flour; Harjit who once precipitated an enquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation for consuming flour worth Rs. 21 lakh from the Army storage and who took his daily constitutional in the Army fields but was never known to have hurt any human being.
Poignant tales
The story of Harjit is one of the numerous poignant tales in Hatir Boi (The Book of Elephants) by Dhritikanto Lahiri Chowdhury, an academic who has had a lifetime association with elephants spanning more than seven decades. Engaging
as well as endearing, they chronicle the traits of this gigantic creature of the wild, so fascinatingly simple yet one that obstinately refuses to submit to well defined categories.
“The people of the Garo Hills in north-eastern India have a term for elephants but they never pronounce it out of fear and reverence for the creature,” says Dr. Chowdhury. “Instead, they call him Dolgappa, the hefty one,” he adds, encapsulating in that innocuous bit of information the stark reality of thousands of people in rural India, for whom the encounter with the elephant carries overtones darker than that signified by the phrase ‘man-animal conflict’.
Shrinking habitat and an increase in the number of elephants are usually regarded as the prime factors responsible for the increasing incidence of the conflicts between humans and elephants. In several places, the forests have become fragmented, forcing the animals to move out into the open if they want to travel. It is very difficult to stop them from wandering because, owing to a scientific sense of food management, elephants know that consumption of fodder on a huge scale damages the forest and so they must travel to another patch till the previous one recovers, says Atanu Raha, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, West Bengal.
Elephants in North Bengal do not usually damage human settlements and crops or attack people unless they happen to be placed on their usual route through the tea estates. “Some seven to eight years ago, we suggested that the elephant corridors should be surveyed and mapped in three separate scales, following which they could be declared as wildlife corridors that could not be violated without permission from competent judicial authority,” Chowdhury says.
The recommendations have gathered dust over the years, but what has remained is the reality of elephants attacking heavily populated villages or local tea gardens in search of salt, cereals or the locally brewed liquor only to be chased and attacked by irate villagers. The Forest Department addresses the issue of damages by paying compensation: an ex gratia payment of Rs. 50,000 to the family of the person killed or Rs. 4,000 per hectare in case of crop damage.
Conflict
But limiting the actions of the Government to payment of compensation only serves to encourage retaliatory killings, feels Dr. Chowdhury. Often, high tension electricity wires are used to electrocute any elephant that might happen to pass through the neighbourhood, leading to the extermination of not just the one accused of death and destruction, but also females and baby elephants.
In fact, about 37 elephants were killed in a span of five years from 1997 to 2002 in Orissa’s Keonjhar district as part of such well planned retaliatory killings. “The government has a duty in the fields, at least to control the confirmed killer elephants that have caused a number of deaths,” he adds.
The last decade has seen the elephant population in North Bengal rise from around 225 to 350, according to official sources. Figures available from two years ago put the number of elephants in the south-western part of West Bengal at 135.
Though the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 and its subsequent amendment in 1977 have rendered obsolete the erstwhile colonial provisions of ‘control’ prevalent in many provinces, Dr. Chowdhury feels the need to check the menace of an ever-increasing number of elephants in the wild. “We need not adopt the organised system of culling prevalent in some African countries as our elephants have never demonstrated the kind of destructive capability that their African counterparts have,” he says. But their capture and training, especially if they are less than eight feet in height, can always be explored as a possibility, Dr. Chowdhury says.
Such a possibility might not be attempted at all, according to Forest Department officials. “We are trying to make people aware of the importance of preserving a balanced ecosystem, including protection of forests as well as providing scientific training to the members of the elephant squad,” said Raha. Local people are also being encouraged not to brew country liquor, he added.
Such measures might not prevent the herds in south-west Bengal from raiding the crops during harvest in September. Dr. Chowdhury, who has his own hypotheses on the situation, says that the increasing number of solitary, young male tuskers in the region maybe the losers who have been driven out from the nearby Dalma hills in Jharkhand by the older males after a defeat in the mating competition. But the young will reassert their primal right in this process of natural selection, with the humans being mere spectators in a bigger game of survival.
Striking a chord
Whether Dr. Chowdhury is describing the mating habits of the elephants he has known or their sleeping habits, the humaneness strikes a chord in the reader. Did growing up in a household, which once possessed around 30 elephants and where the children were made to gulp elephant’s milk to improve their health, make him more sympathetic?
Dr. Chowdhury agrees but points out that the practice of keeping elephants was a fad of the times. What it has taught him is that while some are reliable, there are others who can be admired only from a distance. That there might be adorable elephants in the zoo or circus, but the giants that roam the wild are the real ones.
Dhritikanto Lahiri Chowdhury’s other books include The Great Indian Elephant Book and A Trunk Full of Tales.
He has been associated with IUCN since 1977 as part of their expert panel on elephants, a member of the West Bengal Wildlife Advisory Board and has also conducted surveys on wild elephants in north eastern India on behalf of WWF-International.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
