Why elephants keep getting hit by trains
While a CAG audit finds inadequate implementation of safety measures to be a reason, experts feel fatalities are unavoidable and can, at best, be minimized
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Editor's note: In August, trains in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand came to a standstill due to a brief rasta-roko. The protesters were a group of elephants. A speeding train had knocked down two members of their herd earlier that day. A three-month-old calf and her mother died on the spot. “After this, the rest of the elephants in the herd got furious and surrounded their bodies, blocking the train traffic,” a forest ranger told Hindustan Times. The standoff went on for hours. Eventually, some passengers had to be sent to their destinations in buses. If you read last month’s CAG report on the ministry of railways, you’d totally understand why the elephants were so angry. Indian Railways has identified 194 elephant corridors under its area of operation. The CAG report inspected 77 of them and found that trains killed 61 elephants between 2016 and 2019. This is around 20 a year, up from an average of 10 a year between 2001-10. A lot of this is avoidable. The government had recommended a slew of measures to address this conflict back in …
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