Living With Elephants in South Bengal

FYI -- South Bengal is a Geographic Area Of West Bengal State in Eastern India. It is an area of High Human Habitation. 

The tribal belt of South Bengal has become ground zero of a grim battle with an ever-increasing population of visiting elephants. 

The elephants are here,” Jiten Singh declares without any show of emotion as we arrive at Tapoban (Madhyapara) village. About 65km from Kharagpur town, Tapoban is a tribal hamlet deep within the vast forested terrain known as Jangalmahal, in West Bengal. It is nearing dusk. 

Ordinarily, the village would be asleep in a couple of hours. Tonight, though, will be one of sleepless vigil, not unlike nights during the cultivation season when elephant herds troop out of the jungle to picnic on the paddy.

Singh will lead the night-long watch. Only 20, this college dropout is a veteran of many an encounter with elephants and feels responsible for his village’s safety. 

West Bengal forest department officials have designated him head of the local hula party—village youth who are commissioned and paid by the forest department to chase away raiding herds.

Central to a hula party’s armoury, along with fireballs and crackers, is the hula—a long wooden stick with a gunny bag tied to one end, which is set alight, with a sharp metal spearhead sticking out. Fire scares the elephants. Occasionally, it singes. The metallic spear, a Tapoban villager explains candidly, is for the “satisfaction of hitting out” at an elephant when death looms. In recent years, Tapoban and its neighbouring villages have reported two deaths. Nobody keeps count of the times they’ve been raided.

As we speak to gathered villagers, someone gets a hula ready: The gunny rag has to be doused in burnt Mobil motor oil before it’s set on fire right before the chase. Some others hurry home in the fading light before the elephant herd, reportedly a kilometre inside the forest, emerges on to the road and farm land.

Shaktipada Choudhury, a farmer from neighbouring Pathardahara, guides us to his paddy field, which had been invaded two nights earlier by elephants. In near twilight, it isn’t difficult to make out the jumbo footprints on the ground or the mounds of dung. Choudhury points towards the foggy forest line not too far away. There’s no alarm or anger in his voice. Maybe, a touch of resignation. “That’s where they are.”

In the forested parts of Bengal’s West Midnapore district, the pachyderms are there to stay. They started moving into Bengal from the Dalma Hills in neighbouring Jharkhand in the mid-1980s, an annual migration that only sees their numbers and length of stay in the south Bengal districts increasing. 

Forest department records note that a herd of around 10 elephants made its way into Bengal in the late 1980s, but official figures indicate that 90-120 elephants visited the Midnapore division alone in 2016-17, staying for as many as 285 days in 2016, compared with the herd of 70-80 that stayed for 15 days in 2009-10.

The ensuing run-in between man and elephant has been bitter, and often bloody. The state government paid compensation of Rs1.45 crore and over Rs11 lakh for crop loss and damaged houses, respectively, in Midnapore division during 2016-17; five people were killed during this period in the same division. Even though the toll has been coming down, the situation is described as “alarming”. 

The state’s former chief wildlife warden and principal chief conservator of forests, Pradeep Vyas, told IANS in 2016: “In 2015-16, 108 people were killed and 95 injured by wild elephants in the state. A total of 14 elephants have been killed in retaliation.” Seventy-one of those killed were in south Bengal, with Bankura and West Midnapore accounting for the highest number of deaths. West Bengal also reported the maximum number of deaths caused by elephants in India from 2013-16, followed by Assam, Odisha and Jharkhand.

“We should realize that elephants are not intruders in our land, we are intruding in theirs,” asserts Arup Mukherjee, divisional forest officer (DFO), Kharagpur range, in West Midnapore district.

Migratory elephants too have been killed—there are instances of them getting electrocuted by energized fencing; after falling into ditches and wells; and, on occasion, rogues have been shot by government-appointed marksmen.

Earlier this year, the wildlife magazine Sanctuary chose Bankura-based Biplab Hazra as 2017’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year, showcasing his photograph titled Hell Is Here. In the photograph, an adult female elephant and a baby elephant can be seen struggling across a highway even as one of the front legs of the adult elephant and the calf’s hind seem to have been set on fire by villagers, who can be seen running away in the background.

If the photograph guts the soul of viewers, it is also a true representation of how tense the situation is, says Hazra over the phone. “I took this photo two years back. Forty to forty-five elephants were visiting the Nayagram area. 

The hula party arrived with crackers and fireballs and somebody threw the fire at the elephants. The hula party members are mostly illiterate and have no training on how to chase away elephants, while the forest department doesn’t care much,” says Hazra. “The elephant population has increased but their lands have been encroached. I would blame faulty development for the crisis.”

At Nayagram village, about 40km from Kharagpur, I met a civic police volunteer, Anup Bhakta, an acquaintance who would earlier brew mahua, the local intoxicant, at his home while keeping an eye out for elephants attracted by their love of the brew. The elephants have largely bypassed Nayagram this year, but Bhakta does tell me about farmers who have stopped cultivating the profitable sugar cane after repeated invasions of their fields.

“What to do, babu?” a farmer at Tapoban village wonders when I ask him about the way hulaparties deal with marauding elephants. Herds are chased from village to village as they raid crops and granaries for food. 

An adult elephant requires at least 200kg of leaves and grass daily, and these are often unavailable in forests—ready, nutritious food in human habitats is, therefore, an attraction. “We barely live off our cultivation. If that too is gone to elephants, we will be as good as dead,” the farmer reasons.

In areas like this, where non-contiguous forest tracts are interspersed with human habitat, victims fight victims—and there is no winner.

Credits : Living With The Elephants 

                 By Shamik Bag 

                  Live Mint December 22, 2017