Is a high(er)way for jumbos a good idea?

IN PERSPECTIVE

I was dismayed to read in Deccan Herald (March 31) about plans for an “animal overpass” across the Bengaluru-Kanakapura Road, primarily to allow elephant to cross over unhindered. Apparently, such a proposal has been around for some years but the impetus for demanding the construction of the overpass is the death of an elephant on March 25, after it collided with a BMTC bus on the stretch near Roerich Estate. However tragic the death of an elephant in such an accident, it is important to step back a little and take a hard look at the need for building such passages for elephants along major highways between Bengaluru and Mysuru which have been frequented by wild elephants, mainly male elephants, in recent times.

Natural corridors or artificial passages are extremely important within elephant landscapes to provide elephants safe movement across their seasonal home ranges. Project Elephant Reserves were designed 30 years ago keeping this need in mind. The Mysuru Elephant Reserve in Karnataka, along with adjoining reserves in the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, was clearly delineated to provide a home for over 90% of the state’s sizeable wild elephant population. Several elephant corridors have been identified with the Mysuru Elephant Reserve and some of these have been strengthened by the government with the help of civil society.

We should remember that elephants can cross highways at multiple locations and that the efficacy of an “overpass” as opposed to an “underpass” has not been proven in the case of flat country. Even if elephants safely navigate passages built for them across major highways, there is no guarantee that they would not succumb to some other form of unnatural death in human-dominated areas. Electrocution through contact with live wires, death or injury by falling into open agricultural wells, or feeding on explosive-laden food packages kept by farmers to deter wild pigs are risks the elephants would still face.

A case in point is the wild elephant named “Siddha”, which suffered a fracture after crossing the Bengaluru-Kanakapura highway on the way to Manchanbele Dam in 2016. After prolonged suffering (because of futile attempts to keep it alive even when it had clearly crossed the point of no-return), it succumbed to its injury at the dam site. Clearly, allowing elephants to cross this highway to small, fragmented forest patches surrounded by extensively cultivated land, which is the attraction for elephants in the first place, has wrought enormous suffering for people and elephants, apart from loss of agricultural crops and livelihoods.

In 2012, the Karnataka High Court appointed an elephant task force to examine and make recommendations on a number of issues relating to elephant conservation and management in the state. I had the privilege of chairing the Karnataka Elephant Task Force, which included some of the most experienced elephant managers and biologists in the country including S S Bist, Ajai Misra, M D Madhusudan, and the late Ajay Desai. In its judgement of October 8, 2013, the High Court accepted almost all recommendations of the task force.

A key recommendation accepted was the need for a zonation of the state into elephant conservation zones (comprising largely intact forests), elephant-human interface zones (areas within landscapes with interface of agriculture/settlement and forests) and, most important, elephant removal zones (where human land-use is predominant and it is necessary to keep such areas free of elephants to minimise conflicts between elephants and people). The area between the Bengaluru-Kanakapura-Mysuru and the Bengaluru-Ramnagara-Mysuru highways was clearly identified as “elephant removal zone” by the task force.

Ten years after the judgement, in this region of Bengaluru Rural, Ramnagara and Mandya districts, once almost free of elephants, more than 30 bull elephants indulge in crop-raiding, several hundred farmers file crop compensation claims each year, and both people and elephants die unnaturally from the ensuing conflict.

The Karnataka Forest Department has plugged the exit route of elephants at several places but this overall task of keeping the elephants within the Mysuru Elephant Reserve is yet to be achieved. Once this goal is eventually reached, there would be no need to allow elephants to venture outside the Elephant Reserve or, indeed, to cross major highways in the state! Passages for elephants across such highways become redundant.

At a time when wild elephants are increasingly wandering outside forests to feed on cultivated crops, the need of the hour is sensible landscape-level conservation planning which should aim at maintaining healthy natural habitats, passages or corridors for elephant movement within these landscapes, and active management measures to ensure that elephants largely remain within them. The sharply escalating conflicts between elephants and people in the country require urgent and practical solutions.

(The writer is Honorary Professor of Ecology, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru)