Elephants love to gorge on bananas.

Sharma said in view of the increasing man-elephant conflict, the forest department had taken several steps to minimise casualty.

“We have formed teams, including members of the administration, NGOs, local villagers and the forest department to prevent such conflicts through monitoring.”

Last month, the forest department also set up a permanent forest camp at Hatigarh tea estate in Udalguri district, not very far from today’s incident site, to chase away elephants from human settlements.

Sharma said the forest department had also been conducting awareness programmes to motivate local people to inform the forest department immediately, instead of attacking the pachyderms.

“Depleting forest cover has forced the elephants to stray into human habitats regularly. The only option left is to motivate the people to live and let live,” Sharma said.

According to a study, of the 41,000 square km of elephant habitat in the Northeast, less than 6,000 square km falls under the protected area network resulting in an increase in human-elephant conflicts. Assam has a population of about 5,000 wild elephants.

Sharma attributed the spurt in human-elephant conflict in the last couple of months to the approaching harvesting season.