PHOTO • Parth M.N.

When 30-year-old Deu Kumbhar offered to supervise his uncle’s farm one night last month, it could well have been their final meeting. Residing in a tranquil village of Babarwadi in the Dodamarg Taluka of Maharashtra’s lush coastal Sindhudurg district, farmers often deal with unwelcome rampaging guests. Deu, napping on the perch at the two-acre-farm, got distracted with shuffling noises at 2.30 a.m. In the pitch-dark farm, he flashed his phone light out of curiosity, only to see a gigantic wild elephant surging towards him. Deu immediately turned the light off and the tusker crushed the scarecrow mounted alongside the perch instead. “Wild elephants regularly pay a visit at night”, says Nhano, Deu’s uncle. “If we are lucky, we suffer unsustainable monetary losses”. More than half of the 30 quintals of rice lay strewn in farm the next day. 25 banana trees uprooted. Chillies looked like a toad under a harrow. The farmland resembled a dumping ground. When asked why it has not been cleaned up, Nhano says, “We have to forget the compensation if we do anything until forest officers arrive and gauge the damage”. Babarwadi, located alongside the Tillari dam, is one of the most remote villages in Dodamarg taluka. With erratic electricity and phone lines, the village is wedged amid curvy lanes and various shades of green. Enduring bumpy concrete roads and slippery red mud, it is an arduous task just to get there. Consequently, forest officers do not always turn up immediately to inspect the destruction. “We can segregate the spared crop from the one that is destroyed, safeguard it and lose out on the compensation or we wait for the officers to arrive and risk the elephants barging in again and rupturing the spared crop”, says Nhano. “It is a catch-22 situation”. With one quintal of rice going for around Rs.1500 , the tusker, by spending few minutes in the farm, devastated crop worth Rs. 30,000. The investment of around Rs. 25,000 and the efforts of the past five months were all but devoured. Bananas and chilies included. Nhano incurred losses of around Rs.70,000 in one night. “But the compensation never measures up”, he says.

PHOTO • Parth M.N.

Till 2002, wild elephants could only be seen on TV in Sindhudurg. However, between 1944 to 1990, six dams were constructed in the Uttar Kannada district of Karnataka, shrinking the forestland of the state. “Elephants have genetic memory”, says Anand Shinde, elephant behavior expert. “Their routes are fixed. If there are any changes in those routes due to encroachments, they get confused and stray into villages”. As a result, by 2004, 22 wild elephants had reportedly wandered into Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg and Kolhapur districts, where meticulously tended farmlands of paddy, coconut, cashew, banana, rice and so on, present an attractive buffet for them. So far, they have killed 13 people, injured 21, forced 11,000 examples of crop damage across these two districts, compelling the forest department to pay 10.5 crore rupees in compensation for damages and casualties, according to official records. Meanwhile, 11 elephants have also died in the state, marking the first-ever man-elephant conflict here. A repatriation experiment had been undertaken in 2004, an operation to drive the wild elephants out of Maharashtra into their original habitat. However, it turned out to be a let-down since the original habitat has been subject to fragmentation, and could no longer accommodate wild elephants. With the charade to meet the demands of growing population, forestland has only reduced by the day. “As forests shrank, elephants awoke”, says Shinde. About 70 kilometers away from Dodamarg, in Kudal Taluka of Sindhudurg, the paranoia swelled so much over the years that the central government sanctioned a Rs. 69 lakh campaign in February this year to capture the three wild elephants terrorizing 16 villages around Kudal in the Mangaon valley. Four trained elephants were brought from Karnataka. 204 forest officials from Karnataka and Maharashtra were part of the mission. “The operation lasted for five days”, recalls Sanjay Kadam, forest range officer, Kudal. “It was exhilarating". The mission began on 10 February. The first afternoon was spent trying to locate the elephants. With the absence of walkie-talkies, those who were aware of the elephants’ territory came into the picture. Two of the three wild pachyderms were located in the evening. One fled, the other charged. The veterinary doctor promptly tranquilized him. The speed at which wild elephants run after being sedated is beyond that of a human being. One of the trained elephants chased him down. The team tied one end of a rope to the sedated elephant’s leg and the other end to the leg of the trained elephant and brought him to the kraal, a wooden enclosure at Amberi, three kilometers from Mangaon. The other two elephants were captured similarly over the next five days. Tourists visit the small ground at Amberi to get a glimpse of the elephants. It is a complete turnaround in Kudal that earlier quivered like an aspen merely at their thought. “Our kids would not even be in our own backyard after 7 p.m.”, recollects Subhash Bandhekar, whose farm was wrecked thrice. “We had forgotten what a good night’s sleep meant”. The three elephants uprooted 50 coconut trees from Bandhekar’s garden. Moreover, they busted windows and backdoor of his house to pick up rice bags kept in the room. “We managed to lock ourselves in a different room in time”, says Bandhekar. “We burst some crackers and they went away”. Vijaya Jadhav from Ghanvale village in Mangaon was less fortunate. In front of her kids, she was picked up by one of the elephants, crushed and thrown to the ground. She remains in vegetative state till date.

PHOTO • Parth M.N.