Wildlife damage to crops not monitored: Experts call for data systems, specific action plans

A herd of elephants passing through overnight can leave a paddy field stripped bare by morning. Boar tear through groundnut plots in a matter of hours. Nilgai and peafowl return week after week until little is left worth guarding. Elephant conflict alone was estimated to affect between 0.8 and 1 million hectares of cropland every year in India, touching nearly a million rural families. 

In the Western Ghats, farmers growing banana and arecanut report annual losses approaching or exceeding Rs 1 lakh in severely affected years. In Himachal Pradesh’s hill zones, a field study found an average economic loss of Rs 25,358 per affected farm, with cultivated area shrinking by 12-17 per cent in conflict-prone zones. A 2021 multi-landscape household survey found that roughly half of all households near forests had experienced crop damage from wildlife.

Yet, India has no national database to count any of it. There is no central system to track where wildlife conflict incidents happen, how often, which species cause them, or what they cost farmers.

These findings are at the heart of a comprehensive policy compendium released by the Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), a civil society network of organisations and individuals working at the intersection of agriculture and sustainable and viable farm livelihoods in rural India. 

The paper’s central demand is the establishment of a ‘National Human-Animal Conflict Mission’, backed by a unified data system that records every species — including high-frequency ones like giant squirrels, monkeys, peacocks, parrots, deer, that currently go uncounted — alongside location, seasonality, crop phase, incident frequency, type of loss, and underlying causes. 

This data, it said, must drive species- and context-specific protocols and must be integrated into infrastructure planning, corridor protection and environmental clearances. 

Without such a system, the authors warned, governance will remain permanently reactive, budgets will remain misallocated, and rural communities will continue absorbing public costs with their crops, their cattle, and many times their lives.

Crop loss from wildlife is now among the most financially destabilising threats facing farmers, especially in forest-edge India. Entire farming systems — paddy, bananas, maize, sugarcane, tubers and horticulture near forests and on the hills — are becoming economically unviable. “The invisibility of data ensures the conflict remains underestimated and undebated in a nuanced fashion,” the experts noted in the report.

The Union government has introduced a national action plan for human-wildlife conflict mitigation, expanded Project Elephant with a focus on corridor protection and early warning measures, funded rapid response teams in conflict-prone states, and pushed for geo-tagged digital compensation systems. 

The crisis, however, has deepened regardless these measures, the authors pointed out. The answer, they argued, lies not in the absence of policy intent but in the architecture of the response itself. From compensation schemes being chronically underfunded and early-warning systems working only in patches to fencing projects left without maintenance and mandated interdepartmental coordination almost never institutionalised in practice.

“The contemporary reasons for conflicts on the rise and impacts of these species are still not thoroughly documented, fairly compensated, or effectively managed. The Government of India has admitted that there is no national data on deaths and injuries caused by these species. This data invisibility translates into neglect and misaligned responses,” it said. 

It has asked the government to make rights-based and time-bound compensation and insurance systems. 

Meanwhile, Union government’s flagship insurance scheme called Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana includes wild animal damage as an add-on under ‘localised risks’, subject to state notification. However, the paper pointed out that wild animal damage coverage applies only where notified by the state and accepted by insurers and that it was not uniform nationwide.

“The newly approved add-on cover for wild animal damage marks an important policy shift, but there is currently no evidence on farmer uptake, claim settlement timelines, or administrative performance, as implementation has not yet begun,” it said.