Tamil Nadu govt to carry out elephant profiling across forests in state

Coimbatore: The state govt is planning to carry out elephant profiling in all the forest divisions across the state, as it believes such an effort would help mitigate the human-elephant conflict.

Elephant profiling was done in Coimbatore and the Nilgiris, which are high conflict-prone districts in the state, a few years ago. The exercise was stopped by the forest department due to administrative reasons.

As part of resuming the exercise, a training programme in elephant profiling and individual elephant characterization for focused conflict management was held for the forest range officers and foresters at the Tamil Nadu Forest Academy (TNFA) in the city on Thursday.

The forest department, in association with OSAI, an NGO, conducted the training programme. The forest department is planning to conduct a similar training programme for anti-poaching watchers.

Pointing out that India was home to around 25,000 elephants, a forest officer said around 3,000 of them were in Tamil Nadu.

I Anwardeen, principal chief conservator of forests and chief project director of Tamil Nadu Biodiversity Conservation and Greening Project for Climate Change Response, said the primary aim of the programme was to understand the morphological features and behaviour characterization of each elephant and identify them using separate identities, similar to the task being done for individual tigers.

"We have identified 105 conflict-prone villages and taken steps to address the issue by creating awareness and taking steps to address the human-elephant conflict scientifically," he said.

Anwardeen said the forest department was assessing the individual characterization of wild elephants and the reasons for them to come out of reserve forests as well.

"We are going to introduce standard operating procedures (SOP) for farmers for warding off wild animals to the forest boundaries as part of mitigating human-animal conflict. The SOP is waiting for the state govt's nod and it will be implemented very soon," he said.

V Thirunavukkarasu, principal, Central Academy for State Forest Service, said the human-animal conflict had been reported for more than two decades and it was the duty of frontline staff to sensitize farmers about the behaviour of elephants and the steps to be taken to mitigate the same.