Addressing the elephant in the room

Context: The outrage over the recent killing of the elephant in Kerala has missed highlighting the challenges of the farmers and bigger environmental concerns.

Bigger Challenges :

• Farmer's plight: Farms are destroyed by boars and other animals due to the absence of large predators outside the forest and easily accessible food crops
• Ineffective government intervention: 

• Lack of culling of overabundant animals i.e. “vermin”, declared under the Wildlife Protection Act due to pressure from wildlife activists.
• Neglect by the government: in easing forests clearances has reduced bodies like the National Board of Wildlife and the Forest Advisory Committees to mere rubber stamp.

• Unsustainable compensation schemes: as they are only a fraction of the market value of the crop, and sufferings of bureaucratic processes.
• Every human is responsible: for an ecological disaster faced. Modern, developed, urban humans are more responsible.
• Higher odds of Man-Animal conflict: 

• Elephants have only 25% of their range within protected areas 
• Only 2.6% of the range of leopards, hyenas, and wolves in central India is within protected areas shows that animals and humans have been living together.
• As the population increases, the challenges of living together will also increase.

Way Forward:

• Control the Boar population: As they are classified as ‘least concern’, their killing can be allowed along with modalities to prevent any overhunting and avoid local extinction.
• Reorient forest department:

• Doing away with the wild-life territorial dichotomy of management: accept man-animal interaction as an inevitable process.
• Varying solutions: according to the context, crops, population density, and socio-economic status of the farmers.

• Empower farmers: to better protect their land and provide due and timely compensation so that they do not resort to illegal measures out of desperation.