Odisha Govt lackadaisical to elephant safety
13 Aug. 2019
As we
celebrated the World Elephant Day on Monday (August 12), the distressed
elephants of Odisha had nothing to celebrate with their homes getting
encroached for mining, farming, industries, urbanisation and their
traditional paths getting cut off by irrigation canals, railway lines
and mines. In 1979 there were 2,044 elephants in Odisha but the number
has plunged to 1,976 with increasing number of deaths of the pachyderms.
Keonjhar
district which had 112 elephants in 2002 now has only 40 losing them to
large scale mining while Dhenkanal district which had 81 elephants in
2002 now has 169 with elephants moving in human habitations and
damaging cornfields and orchards. They are distracted and at times
trapped, unable as they are to use traditional migration routes, cut
off by the Rengali irrigation canals and illegal stone quarries.
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