The calf that died an hour after it was spotted in a garden along the tracks. Picture by Biplab Basak

Banarhat (Alipurduar), Sept. 23: Seven wild elephants were killed by a goods train speeding through the forests of the Dooars last night, one of them a calf that battled for life through the night but could not be rescued in the dark.

The elephants were knocked down by the Guwahati-bound train around 11pm near the Moraghat level-crossing, 79km from Alipurduar town, in the largest casualty in a single incident in recent memory.

Senior forest officials reached the spot around midnight with a crane and trucks to take the injured elephants to Gorumara National Park for treatment. Two male elephants, a calf and an adult, were lifted onto two trucks but died later.

One calf slipped into the drain of Moraghat tea garden, through which the tracks pass, and was missed in the dark. Foresters and local residents spotted it only around 6am today, still standing.

The baby elephant, also a male and about four years old, had no bleeding wounds but slumped to the ground and died within an hour of being found, foresters said. The drain is about 25 to 30 metres from the tracks.

The divisional forest officer, wildlife-II, Sumita Ghatak, said four elephants had died on the spot. One was an adult female that was dragged by the train for about 300 metres, damaging the tracks. The mangled body was found lying across the tracks.

So many elephants have never been killed together in recent memory. In January this year, two adults and two calves were crushed by a train in Assam. In 2007, five were struck by lightning in Alipurduar. A year earlier, in May 2006, three elephants were knocked down by trains in the Dooars in 24 hours but in three different incidents.

Foresters suspect that the two calves may have strayed onto the tracks last night and the other elephants, realising the train was coming, had followed them in a desperate effort to save the babies.

“Even though this spot is not on the list of vulnerable spots that the forest department expert committee has recommended to the railways, it is very much part of an elephant corridor. The large number of casualties points to the fact that the goods train was going at a high speed. We have lodged an FIR against the driver of the train with the Banarhat police,” Ghatak said.

Ghatak and the divisional forest officer, Jalpaiguri, Kalyan Das, had rushed to the spot last night to rescue the elephants.

The divisional railway manager of Alipurduar, S.N. Singh, said the railways had been asking the forest department to keep them informed about the movement of elephant herds along train tracks. He described the incident as sad.

Railway officials said the driver had spied at least two elephants on the tracks by the moonlight and slammed the brakes, but it was too late. This stretch of the tracks does not have any big trees on the sides and visibility is clear except when there is fog.

Contacted, forest minister Ananta Roy said he would write to Union forest minister Jairam Ramesh and railway minister Mamata Banerjee. “We had informed the railways that the speed of trains through these areas should not be more than 25kmph, but the divisional railway manager has admitted that the speed of the goods train was 70kmph. I also have doubts whether the train driver was blowing the engine’s horn,” Roy said.

The minister said he had held a meeting with the principal chief conservator of forests, Atanu Raha, and other officials to review the situation. “We had proposed an elevated railway track from Siliguri to Alipurduar…. Apart from elephants, leopards and bison have also been killed by speeding trains along this 180km route,” he said, adding that residents in the neighbourhood were devastated by last night’s incident.

Ramesh Oraon, a worker at the Moraghat tea garden, said he was cycling back home when he saw the goods train speeding. “I suddenly heard the trumpeting of elephants and heard the train come to a stop. About four or five elephants were running around the area, screaming. When I came closer, I saw what had happened, but in the dark I could not see that so many elephants had been hit,” he said.

Around 5am people from nearby tea gardens and areas like Binnaguri and Banarhat started gathering at the spot. A crowd of about 5,000 people watched the dead animals being carried away.

The deaths sparked widespread protests and members of nature groups blocked the tracks around 10am when a railway crane reached the spot from New Jalpaiguri. The blockade was lifted only after the additional divisional railway manager, Indrajit Singh, arrived around noon. The goods train was sent back to Banarhat station, 4km away.

Victor Bose, a member of Dooars Jagaran in Banarhat, who was among the protesters, said last night’s incident was “beyond tolerance”. “We have been demanding a stop to the night running of trains but the railways pay no heed, and this is the result,” he said.

Thirteen elephants, including the seven, have died in train collisions this year, according to forest department officials.

A recent government task force report submitted to the Union environment and forests ministry had said human-elephant conflict and loss of habitat portend serious threats to the elephant population in the country and had called for the creation of a National Elephant Conservation Authority.

It recommended that encroachment on elephant corridors — the routes that herds use to move from one feeding zone to another — be penalised with a minimum fine of Rs 10 lakh and a two-year jail term.

The task force also asked that five areas — Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong-Intanki, Kameng-Sonitpur, East Central, North Western, and the Brahmagiri-Nilgiri-Eastern ghats regions — be declared “elephant landscapes”.