The Elephants Must Go — Kalyan Varma

As conflict escalates in Hassan and the toll of humans and elephants mounts, an activist court and a dedicated task force come together to find a solution.

On February 11, 2014, K Devraj was attacked by a mob at Kallare village in Alur taluka. When I met him at his office the day after, Devraj had a big bandage wrapped around his head, and the left side of his face was swollen from the beating. He was miserable, and he had good reason to be. As Range Forest Officer for Alur, he was the face of authority on the frontlines of the man-elephant conflict in Hassan. The assault he had endured at the hands of the locals was one more painful reminder that the situation had escalated far beyond his ability to cope.

Early in the morning of the previous day Krishnegowda, a farmer in Kallare village, was heading towards his farm when a tusker charged him. Krishnegowda was trampled to death. When Devraj visited the scene as part of his official duties, enraged locals turned on him and on other visiting officials. The mob violence was symptomatic of a public fury that had increased with each such attack, and now had reached a boiling point. The tolerance with which the locals initially regarded the elephants had worn thin; official promises to solve the problem only served to add fuel to the local ire. The villagers saw in each attack, each destroyed crop, each death, a reinforcement of their belief that authority cared only for the elephants, but not for the humans involved in the conflict.

"Look at the missed calls," Devraj said, pushing his cell phone across the table towards me. "Each day, I get 30 to 40 calls from people reporting elephant sightings, or complaining that their crops have been raided. They demand that we come to the spot to see for ourselves – but when we do, we get beaten up…"

Devraj is a gentle, soft-spoken man, expert in the field of 'social forestry' – the growing of trees in large numbers to yield good timber years later. He had been posted to Hassan because the area does not contain designated wildlife parks, and hence it was deemed that the job did not require competence in wildlife or people management. With an ill-equipped staff of less than a dozen, Devraj spent most of his time responding to calls, chasing away elephants that had wandered onto farms and even, at times, holding back vengeful crowds hell bent on taking on the marauding elephants. The work was fraught with risk, but Devraj's experience had made him far more wary of the locals than of the elephants. Every time someone died or crops were damaged, furious crowds gathered at the scene and often, his arrival was the signal for the mob to vent its fury on him.

"We are just not equipped to handle this," Devraj said to me that day.

Some six years earlier, on November 6, 2008, four elephants had been found dead beside a canal in Kappsoge village, close to Nanjangud town. More carcasses were subsequently discovered in the region. Post-mortem examinations led to a verdict of death by cyanide poisoning. The inference was that farmers had intentionally poisoned the elephants, and used tractors to push their bodies into the canal.

The news attracted reporters from major media outlets. A day later, the senior council of judges of the Karnataka High Court, on the basis of a news report in The Hindu, filed a suo moto petition. Matters moved at somnolent pace until 2011, when Vikramjit Sen took over as Chief Justice of Karnataka. The judge, who cared deeply for elephants, took proactive note of the case and, at his instigation, a committee was formed to investigate elephant deaths in the state.

In the intervening years since the discovery of elephant carcasses in Kappsoge, the conflict had intensified. Farmers, incensed alike by elephant raids and official apathy, fought back with poison, guns, and illegal electrified fences. In southern Karnataka alone, 30 elephants were killed that year.

The committee submitted a report that was not made public. Chief Justice Sen was dissatisfied. He argued that the killing of elephants could not be viewed in isolation, but should be examined against the larger context. With Sen in the chair, a high level bench of the Karnataka high court began probing various environmental decisions taken by the state — the digging of trenches, the proliferation of windmills, systematic encroachment into protected land, fragmentation of habitats, mining, the methodology of fixing and paying compensation, the degradation of reserved forests, and more. Since these hearings were on the basis of a suo moto petition, the court was itself the petitioner and the state government the respondent.

The case took on a life of its own, expanding its brief from the Kappsoge tragedy to the wider question of how to save elephants from getting killed across the state and, crucially, how to resolve the escalating conflict situation.

It was not the first attempt at finding a solution in Hassan. In 2006, a committee had been set up under the leadership of wildlife scientist Ajay Desai and Appayya, a former Chief Conservation Officer of Karnataka. The committee estimated a population of 25 elephants, and recommended that they be captured and removed from the region. In 2011, the state Forest Department had on the basis of this report sought permission from the Ministry of Environment and Forests to capture the elephants of Hassan. The MoEF gave its consent.

A lawyer from Mysore, who had empaneled himself in the case, however intervened to argue that the real encroachers were the people, not the elephants. While hearing the objection, the court stayed the MoEF's order for capture and demanded that the state government provide adequate reasoning for its decision. The director of Project Elephant, a body under the MoEF mandated to look into all elephant-related issues including conflict, failed to appear in person and instead sent a note that a new committee had been constituted to examine the issues.

Exasperated, the state government overturned the MoEF committee and set up one of its own, called the Karnataka Elephant Task Force. It included the members of the MoEF committee, but also experts in the field and various petitioners in the case. The committee was briefed to examine all elephant-related issues in the state, with special emphasis on the Hassan conflict.

The Three Zones

In September 2012, the Karnataka Elephant Task Force submitted a comprehensive report that recognized the futility of a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, it proposed a zone-based approach and sought to divide the state into three zones, each with a different set of objectives and plan of action:

Elephant Conservation Zones — where elephant conservation takes priority over competing livelihood goals.

Elephant-Human Coexistence Zones — where both elephant conservation and human livelihoods have to be balanced and reconciled.

Elephant Removal Zones — where concerns of human safety and livelihood take precedence over competing conservation concerns about elephants.

Dr M D Madhusudhan, a senior scientist attached to the Nature Conservation Foundation and a core member of the task force, explained the nuances of the report. This is the gist of his argument: The elephant is covered by the Wildlife Protection Act, which means that even if it were to intrude into your backyard, you cannot shoot it down. We seek to conserve our elephant population by protecting its natural habitat. This works in the case of animals such as the tiger, which most often tends to remain inside protected forests. However, elephants are by nature far-ranging, and will tend to roam outside designated territories. This is the crux of the problem: How do you protect an animal that has a legal shield, but wanders into areas meant for human habitation?

The question is particularly relevant because the Hassan region has not been a typical forest with elephants in living memory, and therefore the people living there have not encroached on the elephant's natural habitat.

"The situation in Hassan is weird," Madhusudhan said. "In our report it has been demarcated as a removal zone; my hope is that one day in the future, it could develop into a co-existence zone. We wanted to create areas where elephants would take priority, other areas where human beings would be given top priority, and still other regions — places in between the forests and the towns — where co-existence could be possible. In our report we used the term Elephant Removal Zone, but if I could rewrite it today I would call it a Human Priority Zone."

The court studied the report submitted by the Karnataka Elephant Task Force. On January 20, 2014, three weeks before I met him for the first time, Devraj was in his office grappling with the usual influx of elephant sightings and damage reports when he got a call from his senior officer. "We have got all necessary clearances to remove your elephants," the official told Devraj. "We are sending you ten captive elephants; as soon as they get there, you can start the capture operation."