Ensure the safety of the elephants

Defendant in elephant poaching case in Dharmapuri. Photo: Special arrangement

dIn the 1990s and early 2000s, Forest Brigand, K. Veerappan sways in the forests of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, notorious for poaching elephant tusks. While this is a distant memory for most people, the recent poaching of an elephant in the Dharmapuri region of Dharmapuri in Pennagaram Taluk, Dharmapuri once again highlights how illegal, lucrative trade continues to pose a threat to wild elephants’ safety.

On February 27, poachers shot and killed an elephant and burned the body to destroy the evidence. The incident launched an impact through the forest department, and the body was found among animal lovers a few days later. The department detained one of the so-called poachers, G. Senthil. Two weeks later, Senthil was found dead in the forest with a rifle on his body. Senthil’s family and activists suspect he might be the victim of “extrajudicial killings” despite officials claiming a wearing sentinel attacked forest workers and escaped.

In anger, the state transferred the case to the core of the crime department for inquiries. The Madras High Court sought an investigation into a petition seeking by the Central Bureau of Investigation, ordering a second autopsy on the remains of the suspicious poacher to determine the cause of his death.

The forest department claims poaching no longer poses a serious threat to wild elephants. However, since the population of the elephant people is said to be rebounding, there are concerns that poaching groups can start operating regularly again in Tamil Nadu.

According to the department’s elephant death audit framework, aimed at ensuring transparency of the causes of elephant deaths, poaching accounts for 1% of all elephant deaths recorded since 2010. Poaching accounts for 7.5% of all “unnatural deaths” including poisoning, as well as train, train and road accidents. The last elephant death reported by the portal was said to have occurred in April 2024 at the Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve, located at the junction of the eastern and western ghats.

While the government insists that its protection policies have strengthened the elephant population and successfully reduced poaching cases in the past two decades since the death of Veerappan, conservationists are concerned. A report from the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau in 2019 highlights the investigation of the highest copper tube in the forest sector in the investigation of elephant poaching cases in many forest sectors including Megamalai, Valparai, Nilgiris, Coimbatore, Coimbatore, etc. These include underreporting cases and excluding ivory buyers from the defendants’ list. The realization of the report is that in 2022, the Madras High Court formed a special investigation team that investigated 19 cases of poaching elephants in Tamil Nadu. In addition, the Ministry of Forests and Climate Change’s 2022 response, based on the environment sought by the Right to Information Act of 2005, noted that the elephant population had dropped sharply between 2012 and 2017, from more than 4,000 to less than 2,800. In 2024, the government reported that the population had recovered to more than 3,000 elephants.

Over the past few years, there have been concerns over the emergence of poaching groups targeting wildlife across the state, especially some of the wildlife in Neilgiris. There have been confirmed instances of groups from northern India poaching tigers in Tamil Nadu. Some cases of poaching leopards remain unresolved. The Forest Department is also said to have known that interstate poaching gangs are operating within the Nielgiris district, hunting wild game meat and are working with their counterparts in Kerala to work on these groups.

According to activists, poaching has been greatly reduced due to increased surveillance in the forest sector, but structural reforms within the sector are still needed. These will ensure transparency in reporting cases and better training of field staff to conduct a thorough investigation to ensure convictions, eliminating the use of force to elicit confessions from the defendants, they said.