BHUBANESWAR: As the Orissa Government began a three-day exercise on Saturday to count the wild elephants in the State, a prominent wildlife organisation warned that the very survival of the wild pachyderms was under threat owing to large-scale deforestation and diversion of forest lands mainly for mining and other developmental projects.
Severe dent
"The Vedanta Alumina's proposed alumina refinery in Kalahandi district, Brutanga irrigation project in Nayagarh district and a large number of steel and iron projects coming up in Jajpur, Keonjhar and Sundargarh districts are going to cause a severe dent to the wild elephants population in Orissa,'' said Kulamani Deo, spokesperson for Wild Orissa, a Bhubaneswar-based organisation.
The planners and administrators should think about the survival of elephants before clearing projects that impact elephant habitats, Mr. Deo said in a statement. Developmental projects that had caused damage to elephant habitats in the past include the multipurpose irrigation projects at Rengali and Hirakud and various thermal power projects in Talcher area, he said.
Orissa's forests were home to thousands of elephants once. But the current problems of deforestation due to shifting cultivation, encroachment, forest fires, establishment of power and irrigation projects and industries were shrinking elephant habitats, Mr. Deo observed. "Orissa's elephants are susceptible to a possible extinction in the near future if the problems facing them are not tackled immediately.''
As per official figures, Orissa had 2,044 wild elephants in 1979. But the number of these elephants came down to 1,841 when the last elephant census was done in 2002.
Owing to severe pressure on their habitat and food loss, elephants are in worse confrontation with people in recent years. A total of 259 persons were killed by wild elephants in the State between 1995-96 and 2003-04.
Prominent mining areas in Keonjhar, Dhenkanal, Sundargarh, Angul, and Sambalpur districts are severely affected by man-elephant conflict.
However, Biswajit Mohanty of the Wildlife Society of Orissa is of the view that poaching of male elephants also posed a serious threat to the State's elephant population.
A total of 200 elephants were killed by poachers between 1990-91 and 2004-05, while another 100 had been killed in accidents during this period.
"Lack of seriousness"
"The State Government has never been serious about checking poaching of the wild pachyderms. Unfortunately, the government records many unnatural deaths of wild elephants as accidental deaths, instead of deaths due to poaching,'' Mr. Mohanty said.
