Bhubaneswar, June 4: On the eve of World Environment Day, senior wildlife officials from Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Bengal today came together to work out an inter-state co-ordination strategy and to resolve the long standing issue of man-elephant conflict.

Organised by the wildlife wing of the forest department, the workshop titled “Man-Elephant interface for the eastern regional states of India” aimed to focus on conflicts arising due to spatial and food-related problems.

It is common knowledge that elephants are migratory creatures in nature and do not confine within a particular forest. They keep migrating from one district to another within a state or from one state to another state following certain “corridors”. Thus, experts believe that it is not just a particular pachyderm habitat that needs to be managed, but corridors connecting habitats including the ones extending over the neighbouring states, need to be taken care of.

In Orissa, 24 districts are used permanently by residing or migrating elephants. It is one-of-its-kind state where such a large chunk of geographical area is used by the animals. This passage affects about 2,000 villages on a day-to-day basis.

Such encounters have been strong in four states — Orissa, Assam, Bengal and Jharkhand — with human deaths in the past year nearing 49, 67, 85 and 91, respectively

“Issues that need to be addressed immediately include habitat and corridor fragmentation, poaching, retaliatory killing, deaths in train mishaps and electrocution, upkeep and registration of captured animals and the skewed sex ratio (1:2.7) according to the last elephant census,” said A.N. Prasad, the director of Project Elephant.

Timely payment of compensation, uniform rules for ex-gratia and exploring crop insurance also needs to be looked into seriously, said Prasad. The instances of man-elephant interface have grown in recent years in Orissa with a total number of people killed during 1998-99 to 2003-04 being 228. During the period of 10 years (1994-95 to 2003-04) a total of 2,888 instances of damages have been recorded on the basis of compensation payment made to the victims, due to elephants.

Besides, elephants damaged 18,152.67 acres of paddy during the same period. Instances of animal killing resorted to by villagers in retaliation has also increased during 1998-99 to 2003-04 and eight such cases have been reported. A total of Rs 2,559,072 has been paid as compassionate payment during 1992 to 2003.