'Radio collars can not prevent tusker-human tiff'

Core Committee formed to solve tusker menace says it is a failure

With this, the Core Committee formed to solve the tusker menace say that amendment to laws with regard to capturing of rogue tuskers, taming them and selling them must be thought about at the Parliamentary level.

Addressing a news conference on Thursday, Committee Members Cheranda Nanda Subbaiah, Prabhu, Suraj and others said that one of the two rogue elephants which was caught in Hassan and released at Bandipur had recently barged into a coffee plantation at Thithimati here.

They said that rogue tusker menace is on the rise at Kodagu, Hassan, Mysore, Chamarajanagar, Tumkur and certain parts of Bangalore. Due to this, crops worth lakhs of rupees are being lost. “There are some hitches in the law pertaining to sale of elephants after taming them. These laws must be relaxed,” they said and added that radio collar installation is not a solution for the existing problem.

“With radio collar, we can only track the movement of the tuskers but they cannot be made to stay away from the plantations. Similar experiment done on tigers earlier was a failure. Now the experimentation with tusker too has come to meet the same conclusion,” members said and mocked some of the organisations for their negligent demand kept before the Government for installation of radio collars to solve tusker menace.

“Environmentalists have not taken environment on contract. Government should not succumb to the demands of such environmentalists and implement programmes haphazardly,” they said.

Solution

The committee said that capturing the tuskers and taming them is the only solution to the tusker-human tiff that has been going on for so long. They said that though a solution is ready before the Government, it has not been sparing thought on this solution. Due to the procrastination from Government, the incidents of tusker killing by poisoning them is continuing still.

They said that construction of boundary walls, separating the forest areas too can solve the problem. A sum of Rs 1,500 crore has been spent to put an end to the elephant-man tiff under the ‘Project Elephant’ programme over the last 19 years. Unfortunately, the problem has not been solved yet.

They said that Core Committee will have final round of discussion with the insurance company and submit a report to the Government soon.