20 October 2019 10:14 IST

A video featuring the reality of the practice of poaching elephants for their tusks in Tamil Nadu

After the death of Veerappan in 2004, it was widely believed that the elephant population in Tamil Nadu would thrive. But another group of poachers became active in various forest divisions of Tamil Nadu tracking the movement of the tuskers, felling them, and selling their tusks to middlemen.

Here is how poachers go about their operations inside forests:

1) Poachers hide their guns in trees within the forests and retrieve them while hunting

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2)While one person or group chases the tusker, the others shoot it down

3)After hunting it down, the poachers cut the tusks into pieces inside the forest itself

4)They hand them over to the middleman who waits in a car

5)Later the tusks are fashioned into ivory products and sold for large sums of money

A Wildlife Crime Control Bureau document has now exposed how the T.N. Forest Department has done little to address poaching till recent times.Just a week before Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami's visit to Coimbatore forest officials arrested Babu Jose, one of the main accused in elephant poaching cases in Tamil Nadu over the last decade. He now holds the key to the full story behind elephant poaching in T.N. forests, which has come out only in bits and pieces till now.

While the forest officials managed to apprehend Babu Jose, they still haven’t named the other key accused, Aji Bright, also from Kerala, as an accused in any of the elephant poaching cases in Tamil Nadu. They are the two who initiated poaching activities in Tamil Nadu by luring poachers, mainly from Theni district, for money, the latest report by the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), a unit of the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, charges.

The WCCB has now written to the State’s Forest Department, expressing concern that Babu Jose’s name was included in only three cases, and Aji Bright’s name was never mentioned, despite knowledge to the contrary.

According to the letter, accessed by The Hindu, WCCB said that it was surprised to find that most of the poachers had got anticipatory bail even though they were involved in many of the elephant poaching cases. Also, a chargesheet was not filed in most of the cases because some of them were absconding, as per records of forest range offices.

The officials of WCCB, Southern Region, went through the case sheets after they were asked by Justice M.M. Sundresh and Justice N. Sathish Kumar of the Madras High Court to investigate the matter related to the death of seven elephants in Megamalai Wildlife Sanctuary and 12 elephants in Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve.