Seven elephants were killed after a New-Delhi bound Rajdhani Express rammed into a herd during the wee hours of December 20 morning. The engine, along with four coaches of the superfast express, were derailed even as no injuries to the passengers were reported. A grievously injured pregnant elephant delivered a male calf after the hit, while four sub-adults of the same herd and two other females perished in the collision. The male calf remains in a critical condition at the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation in Kaziranga.
According to officials at North Frontier Railway, a division of Indian Railways, around 100 elephants were attempting to cross the railway track when the incident occurred, even as locals alleged that the accident was a case of negligence as seen in the earlier instances of elephant deaths in the area. The incident has raised a question mark yet again on mitigation efforts aimed to prevent elephant deaths on railway tracks in Assam.
Sinu Moni Deuri, a 35-year-old farmer was up all night with her family at Sangraijurai, a village in the Kampur sub-division of Nagaon district in central Assam. The local village panchayat had alerted her by 10:30 PM through an SMS about a herd of 150 elephants roaming around in the area. With her house barely situated a hundred metres away from the railway, she was one of the eyewitnesses of this horrifying tragedy.
“Towards the beginning of the paddy harvest season, elephants come to our villages. They do not do a lot of damage but we have to keep an eye to prevent them from entering our farms. So, I lit two fires in our courtyard,” Deuri said, recounting the incident.
“At around 2 AM, they started moving closer to railway tracks. Some people were trying to chase the elephants from their fields. The elephants started to move towards the railway tracks. We were worried that the Rajdhani might cross at any moment, praying for a safe passage for the elephants. However, around 2:15 AM, there was a loud bang. We saw sparks and heard the cries of the injured elephants. The train was off the rails,” Deuri narrated.
According to Forest Ranger, Shemim Akhtar, there were 150 elephants roaming around in the area for a few days. “We had forest guards patrolling the Kothiatoli area, around two kilometres from the present incident site, where the elephants cross the railway tracks and National Highway 27. This was an unusual spot for the elephants to cross,” Akhtar told Down To Earth (DTE). The ranger, however, added that a similar incident had happened on December 17, 2016, in which four elephants, including a calf, were mowed down by a speeding train.
On the other hand, Public Relations Officer of North Frontier Railway, Kapinjal Sarma, said the incident took place at a location which is not a designated elephant corridor. “The loco pilot on observing the herd of elephants applied emergency brakes. However, elephants dashed with the train,” Sarma stated in a press release. Locals, however, point to a pattern of elephant hits by speeding trains, which seems to be increasing every season.
According to senior journalist and a resident of Kampur, Molan Laskar, the existing elephant corridors are facing multiple threats with conversion of agricultural lands toward development projects. “These elephants used to come from the Mikir Bamuni area which is a designated elephant corridor. Curiously, this corridor has been fragmented by a large solar park built by Azure Company and stone quarries in the area. During the harvest season, around 300 elephants move from eastern Karbi Anglong and Kaziranga towards the Bamuni hills and then further east towards Western Karbi Anglong, along a hilly tract. This tract is facing largescale land encroachment, land conversion and mining activities so the elephants now cross through the railway tracks to reach the hilly areas, which remain abundant sources of food,” Laskar told DTE.
Mikir Bamuni is also the spot where 18 elephants died due to an alleged lightning strike.
Even as North Frontier Railway responding to the incident maintains that the incident site is not a designated corridor, a joint survey of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Assam Forest Officials, Indian Railways and Wildlife Institute of India, points towards an alarming statistic. The survey conducted between 2023 and 2024 states that a vast railway network often intersects wildlife habitats, and movement pathways of wild elephants that occur outside the purview of protected areas. “Consequently, train hits account for the second-highest cause of non-natural elephant mortality in the state, with reports indicating deaths of 115 elephants between 1990 and 2018, and at least 33 elephants between January 2017 and March 2023. Further, the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) zone accounted for the highest number of elephant deaths in the period 2014-2022 (65 deaths),” states the report titled Asian Elephant - Train Collisions on Vulnerable Railway Stretches in the State of Assam of 2024.
The report recommended that to minimise elephant-train collisions either by constructing underpasses and overpasses wherever possible, by reducing the time taken by elephants to cross the railway tracks by easing movement across the track through construction of ramps and level crossings, and by implementation of technology for early detection and warning systems.
Sources in the railways said in some stretches intrusion detection devices use a network of optical fibre networks and ground knowledge from forest guards and village volunteers. At Kampur, however, which has been reporting increasing instances of human-elephant conflicts, these measures were absent. Between 2000 to 2023, Wildlife Institute of India recorded 1,209 elephant deaths of which 626 elephants died due to anthropogenic or human-induced causes. Nagaon Wildlife Division, under which Kampur falls, recorded 76 deaths.
The elephants move along Karbi Hills beginning from Kaziranga towards Western Karbi Anglong. Shocked by the incident, local organizations have demanded punitive measures against forest and railways authorities. “Year after year, despite various studies and reports, human elephant conflicts have taken a huge toll on elephant and humans in this expanse between Kaziranga and Karbi Anglong. The people and the wildlife are witnessing an onslaught of various linear and non-linear developement projects. When these issues are pointed out to the government, there is hardly any activity on the ground. The state response to such conflicts is evict people calling them as intruders and isolate long ranging animals like elephants to small pockets called protected areas. There has to repercussions for such negligence. We demand the arrest under various sections of WLPA and BNS and termination of incumbent forest minister, officials of forest department, and Indian railways officials responsible for this incident,” Pranab Doley, a political activist hailing from Kaziranga, told DTE.