10th Sep., 2018


Last month, the Supreme Court (SC) did something extraordinary. On August 9, in response to a Public Interest Litigation, it directed the Tamil Nadu government to seal or close down 39 hotels and resorts constructed on an “elephant corridor” in the Nilgiri Hills in violation of law, within the next 48 hours.

Justice Lokur, along with Justices S Abdul Nazeer and Deepak Gupta also said elephants were the country’s “national heritage” and expressed displeasure about the encroachments.    

It was a historic judgement by the SC on India’s elephants. While they play a key role as a “Keystone Species” in the forest ecosystem and are termed as the “National Heritage Animal of India” by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the plight of the Indian Elephant is known to all. As more forest areas face fragmentation due to unscrupulous encroachment and other developmental activities, the pachyderms are forced to migrate and find themselves in human-dominated landscapes, leading to human-elephant conflict. Cattle grazing, coffee and tea plantations, private tourist resorts, electric fences, expansion of agricultural fields, vehicular traffic especially during night hours and human settlements along elephant corridors pose a greater threat for the free movement of elephant herds that are in the habit of migrating across 350-500 sq km annually.

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