COIMBATORE: Following the death of a 35-year-old mother elephant after it was hit by a train at Marappalam, near Madukkarai, the Forest Department is thinking of installing surveillance cameras to study movement of elephants in the Walayar-Podanur railway section.
“Apart from proposing to the railway authorities to run trains at slow speeds in this section, we will install surveillance cameras, as in Tiruvallur district, where cameras sent SMS alerts about the presence of elephants. We plan to include this measure and erect fences. Ramps will be built wherever necessary to enable the animals to cross the tracks,” said DFO (in charge) A Periyasamy.
“Now, we have to respond to and manage every human-animal conflict in Coimbatore, we must sit together to develop long-term strategies to solve the problem,” he added.
A team comprising Assistant Conservator of Forests Raj Kanna, range officers C Dinesh Kumar and M Senthil Kumar, besides forest guards and anti-poaching watchers would check places where elephants cross the tracks and plan measures to prevent accidents.
Rajeev Srivastava, Director of Tamil Nadu Forest Academy (TNFA), stressed the need to develop site specific mitigation strategies after carefully studying the site and inter-department cooperation and support of NGOs to solve the problem.
K Kalidasan of the OSAI Environmental Trust also emphasised that conflict mitigation could not be achieved by Forest Department alone. Other departments and civil society must join hands to end human-animal conflict. TNFA Assistant Director Kaushal said people across the country are watching how human-animal conflict in Coimbatore is being handled. TNFA plans to open a Centre for Excellence on Human-Animal Conflict, which can be a hub for developing and testing mitigation strategies. D Boominathan, landscape coordinator, WWF, pointed out, “Incidents of wild elephants deaths on roads is higher than those due to poaching. We have records on elephants, leopards, sambar deer, etc, getting killed on road.”
