Due to deforestation, huge increase in the number of deaths due to elephant attacks and infiltration of settlements in Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Assam is a cause for concern.
In early January, elephants killed 22 people in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum district, especially in the Chaibasa and Kolhan forest division areas, in nine days. Such a large number of deaths had never before been recorded in a single area within a single week. According to India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Odisha reported the highest number of deaths at 499 in elephant attacks on settlements between 2017 and 2022, followed by 462 in Jharkhand, 384 in West Bengal and 358 in Assam. There were 337 deaths in Chhattisgarh between 2018–19 and 2022–23. If we look at Jharkhand’s data for five years month-wise, elephants killed an average of 7.7 people every month. Between 2020 and 2025, elephants killed 525 people in Jharkhand, an average of 8.75 deaths per month. Most reports based on such data blame elephants. “Elephant terror” has been used at many places in the report.
The village that had never seen elephants before
Between January 1 and January 9, elephants killed 22 people in West Singhbhum district. On the night of 6 January, an elephant killed six people in Bavadiya village under the Noamundi range. Roop Singh Laguri, a resident of Bavadiya village and an eyewitness, says that he had never seen an elephant in the village in his 49 years of life. Laguri explains, “We used to sleep without any worry in thatched huts outside our houses. There had never been any incident of elephant here before, so there was no fear. But since the night of January 6, fear has spread in the entire village. Suddenly there was a noise that the elephant has come. The forest department also called and informed that the elephant has entered the village. But by the time they reached, many people were dead.”
Shadow of fear: Local people driving away herd of elephants in Singhbhum, Jharkhand
The elephant killed four people of a family sleeping in a thatched hut outside the house and also killed two others in a nearby hamlet. After the incident the village is living under the shadow of terror. There are several hamlets in this village with a population of about 2,000. The forest department has provided two torches and some firecrackers to drive away the elephants, but villagers say that this is insufficient. The crackers have already run out and just two torches are not enough for such a large population.
closed corridors, stray elephants
The “Hathi Mitra” group in Jharkhand works for awareness and conflict-prevention related to human-elephant encounters. Its founder Tapas Karmakar says that the area where these incidents are taking place has historically been a corridor for elephants. He explains, “The Simlipal Tiger Reserve forest located in the Mayurbhanj district of Odisha is connected to the West Singhbhum (Chaibasa) region of Jharkhand. Elephants have always been coming and going through this area. The elephants that come to the Saranda forest, often come to Simlipal through the Chaibasa route. But now this corridor is being heavily interfered with. Houses are being built, roads are being built. Due to this, the elephants are wandering and moving in unknown directions. Have been.”
The Saranda forest located in this region is known as the largest sal forest belt in Asia. It is extremely dense and covers 82,000 hectares, spanning several districts of Jharkhand and connecting with Odisha. The region is also home to world-renowned iron ore reserves of over 2,000 million tonnes.
Saranda is considered to be the major elephant habitat of Jharkhand. It remained a prosperous area for elephants until the early 1990s. But mining has severely disrupted their habitat. Dr. Rakesh Kumar Singh, who has done research on the ecology of these areas and especially elephants, believes that the root of this conflict lies in policy failure.
According to their research, mining deeply damages elephant habitat. Forest land was used for highways and other projects, which blocked elephant paths. Many companies claim that they do not disturb elephant corridors. Dr. Singh says that she often does not understand the real meaning of the corridor. “A corridor doesn’t just mean a narrow path,” he explains. Companies leave the corridor on paper, but pursue mining and development in the elephants’ traditional core habitat. “This confuses the movement of elephants and increases conflict.”
driving away elephant cause of death
Now elephants have started escaping from their traditional habitats and moving to new areas. When they enter the villages, the conflict turns into retaliatory violence, leading to deaths on both sides. Elephants are often driven aggressively from one place to another. On January 9, elephants killed three people in Haldia and Benisagar villages of Manjhgaon block of West Singhbhum. 18-year-old Damodar Kuldi was also among the dead.
Dinesh Hembram, a resident of Damodar’s hamlet, said, “Around six in the morning, there was a noise that the elephant had arrived. The villagers started chasing it away and Damodar also went with them. But suddenly the elephant turned and attacked the people. Damodar got hit. The elephant caught hold of him and threw him and he died.” Uncontrolled and illegal mining in Saranda has resulted in large-scale deforestation. The Shah Commission’s 2010 investigation stated that Saranda’s biodiversity had been seriously impacted. A study by the Wildlife Institute of India (2015–16) found that plant species in Saranda had declined from 300 to just 87.
According to a report, in the last 15 years around 16,000 hectares of forest land in Jharkhand was used for non-forest purposes in the name of mining and development. The important thing is that most of the mining has taken place in the main habitat areas of elephants. In the last five years alone, there have been 101 deaths in Singhbhum region, making it the second most affected area after Ranchi region (where 173 deaths occurred). Both the areas include several forest divisions.
Difference between claims and figures
Jharkhand Forest Department claims that deaths due to human-elephant conflict have decreased. But when five years of data are compared, the numbers appear to be increasing. 462 deaths were recorded in Jharkhand between 2017 and 2022. This number will increase to 525 between 2020 and 2025. Jharkhand’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) Paritosh Upadhyay, while talking to Outlook, admitted that human interference in the forests has increased.
He said, “Many villages have come up deep inside the Palamu Tiger Reserve. Population and human activities are increasing within the forests. The most worrying thing is habitat fragmentation. Earlier, elephants used to have large, connected areas. Now development activities are fragmenting them. When connectivity is lost, elephants start wandering. The traditional corridors through which they used to move from one area to another have also been broken. Now those corridors are being re-identified so that their development can be facilitated.” Can be done.”
Corridors between states, elephant deaths
Around 150 elephant corridors have so far been identified across India. The highest number of 26 is in West Bengal, followed by 17 in Jharkhand and 14 in Odisha. But amid reports of human deaths, one truth often remains unseen: the unnatural deaths of elephants. Information received through RTI shows that between 2009 and 2023, there were unnatural deaths of 1,381 elephants across India, which included cases ranging from electrocution to poisoning. In Jharkhand alone, 100 elephants died unnaturally between 2018 and 2025.
