Elephant’s movement sends Forest department into huddle

Hyderabad: One single wild elephant’s movement on the Telangana-Maharashtra border has sent the State Forest department into a huddle, besides prompting officials to learn, discuss and adopt new strategies and measures in the event of a herd or more lone elephants venturing into the State again.

It may be recalled that an elephant had ventured into the State limits in the first week of April. It trampled two farmers to death in a gap of two days in Kagazhnagar forest division.

Maharashtra officials have also tracked the movement of a lone elephant in Lakhmendra Hills in Surendra Nagar forest limits in their State bordering Telangana. Most Telangana Forest officials, especially field officers, are unaware of the strategies to be adopted in the event of the elephants making their way back into the State’s forests.

Accordingly, senior officials held a meeting with retired forest officials from other States and experts at the Forest Academy in Dhulapally on Monday.

This was followed by field levels meeting in Kagazhnagar, Mancherial and Adilabad divisions on Tuesday. The objective was to exchange ideas and learn the strategies and measures to save the local people and safeguard their interests in case of elephant movement. To this effect, a four-level strategy has been finalised after deliberations with experts and retired forest officials from other States.

The brainstorming session with experts and retired officials helped in learning about the methods to be adopted in handling situations at the field level like tracking the elephant movement at nights and alerting local villagers to refrain from heading towards such areas, PCCF and Chief Wildlife Warden MC Pargaien said.

In the second-level, field level officers in identified problematic areas were conducting meetings in their respective limits on the arrangements to be made and other aspects.

This would be followed with a series of meetings with local villagers to create awareness on the dos and don’ts etc in the third level. These meetings would be held shortly.

Finally, inter-departmental coordination meetings would be conducted in the fourth level. At these meetings, officials from Police, Revenue, Panchayat Raj and Rural Development and Tribal Welfare would be invited to discuss multiple aspects. For instance, once the elephant moves to a reserve forest area and ventures into a village, it becomes a law and order issue.

At this stage, coordination among the officials of different departments was crucial and these meetings would be conducted soon after those with villagers, he said.

Box item Though the State Forest department is taking up several tiger conservation and protection measures effectively, many officials in different divisions, especially those bordering Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, lack sufficient equipment and infrastructure to handle elephant invasions. Accordingly, the Telangana Forest department is seeking the help of the union government to grant nearly Rs.6 crore under CSS Tiger Protection and Elephant Protection programme.

These funds would be used for multiple purposes, including procurement of night drone cameras, night vision cameras, torch lights and other required equipment.

This apart, several awareness programmes have to be conducted for local villagers, besides taking up preventive measures, PCCF MC Pargaien said.