More elephants or less space?

New, DNA-based report reveals a drop in numbers, pointing to shrinking habitats and fragmented redistribution.

India is home to over half of the world’s remaining wild Asian elephants, and our landscape plays a crucial role in their future. Within India, the Western Ghats remain the elephants’ largest stronghold, hosting about 11,934 elephants (Karnataka 6,013, Tamil Nadu 3,136, Kerala 2,785) – over half (~53%) of the national population, according to a new report. Yet the reality behind these figures tells a complex story of shifting baselines, habitat fragmentation, perceived population “explosions,” and difficult decisions about human-elephant conflict management.

A new report, ‘Status of Elephants in India: DNA-based Synchronous All India Population Estimation (SAIEE), 2021-25’, used non-invasive genetic sampling and genetic mark-recapture techniques suited to estimating populations where counting every individual is impractical. The study places India’s wild elephant population at ~22,446 (range: 18,255-26,645).

This is notably lower than the ~27,312 estimated in 2017 through block counts, sighting-based surveys, dung counts, and extrapolation. However, researchers stress that the two figures are not directly comparable due to a methodological shift; the 2025 figure represents a new DNA-based baseline.

As a conservation practitioner working along the Western Ghats for a decade, I have often seen how elephant numbers shape perceptions of conflict. When a coffee estate owner learns elephants are nearby, the first question is “how many?” A lone tusker is viewed as unpredictable and dangerous, while herds are seen as direct threats to crops and property. Forest staff also focus on counting elephants, since both communities
and officers consider this information vital for managing conflict.

During sightings, I have observed that the presence of calves often reinforces the perception that populations are increasing. If farmers witness herds raiding crops, the common explanations are “no food in the forest” or “too many elephants.” These perceptions may not align with science but reflect lived experiences that deserve recognition in the broader context of human-elephant interactions.

For farmers or officers in high-conflict areas, the logic seems clear: more elephants are seen in fields, more compensation claims are filed, and human injuries or deaths persist; so the population must be growing.

Such perceptions often drive drastic mitigation actions – physical barriers, captures, translocations, and possibly, in the future, population control in conflict-prone regions.

India has advanced considerably in developing evidence-based elephant estimation methods, thanks to the efforts of ecologists, biologists, and forest departments. The SAIEE approach required massive sampling across vast areas and extensive data analysis. Yet, such large-scale exercises inevitably face challenges in applying prescribed methods and ensuring data quality.

Shifts in estimation methodology every five years, and the declaration of SAIEE 2025 as a new baseline, create an impression of one step forward, two steps back. The big question now is what to make of the numbers reported in the 2012 report, in which several experts believed that there were errors in computation. And the 2017 report (it also adopted a standardised method, fixing some of the concerns of the 2012 exercise), which indicated that the elephant population in the country was largely stable in comparison with the 2012 estimate.

A larger social challenge

While people’s perceptions say otherwise, the SAIEE 2025’s “new baseline” demonstrates a decline, inviting the interpretation that we are seeing a potential redistribution
of elephants into smaller,
fragmented patches and increased interactions due to shrinking habitats.

This brings us to a very critical aspect of elephant conservation centred on the role that habitats play in the survival of this species. According to the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC), about 95,700 hectares of forest were diverted for non-forest purposes between 2019 and 2024 – for highways, mining, dams, and other infrastructure. Such loss critically impacts elephants, which need vast, contiguous habitats.

MoEFCC data also reveal that 528 elephants died between 2019 and 2024 from electrocution, train collisions, and other unnatural causes, while elephants caused 2,829 human deaths in the same period.

Given these trends, the SAIEE 2021-25 rightly stresses the urgent need to improve habitat quality, connectivity, and corridor management, along with more effective, community-based approaches to human-elephant coexistence.

Population ecology offers the scientific bedrock for understanding elephant populations. Yet for practitioners in the field, officers at the frontlines, and communities sharing spaces with elephants, the real challenge extends beyond numbers. That challenge is more spatial and social – how we manage land, livelihoods, and coexistence in a context where the problem is not too many elephants, but too little space, reducing levels of tolerance, and static policies.

(The writer is a conservation practitioner and researcher. He works with Humane World for Animals on human-elephant conflict management in Kodagu)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.