Ensuring the safety of elephants

The accused in the elephant poaching case in Dharmapuri. Photo: Special Arrangement

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the forest brigand, K. Veerappan, who held sway over the forests of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, was notorious for poaching elephants for ivory. While that is now a distant memory for most people, the recent poaching of an elephant in Pennagaram taluk in Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu once again highlights how the illegal, lucrative trade in wildlife products continues to pose an existential threat to the safety of wild elephants.

On February 27, poachers shot dead an elephant and burnt the carcass in a bid to destroy evidence. The incident sent shock waves through the Forest Department, which discovered the carcass a few days later, and among animal lovers. The Department detained one of the alleged poachers, G. Senthil. A fortnight later, Senthil was found dead in the forest with a rifle on his remains. While officials have claimed that a handcuffed Senthil assaulted the forest staff and escaped, Senthil’s family and activists have raised suspicions that he could have been the victim of an “extrajudicial killing”.

Amid the outrage, the State government transferred the case to the Crime Branch-CID for inquiry. Responding to a petition from Senthil’s wife seeking a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Madras High Court ordered a second postmortem to be conducted on the suspected poacher’s remains to ascertain the cause of his death.

The Forest Department claims that poaching no longer poses a serious threat to the wild elephant population. However, with the elephant population supposedly on the rebound, there is concern that poaching groups could begin operating frequently once again in Tamil Nadu.

According to the Department’s Elephant Death Audit Framework, introduced to ensure transparency about the cause of deaths of elephants, poaching accounted for less than 1% of all elephant deaths recorded in the State since 2010. Poaching accounts for 7.5% of all “unnatural deaths”, which include poisoning, and train and road accidents. The last elephant death that was caused by poaching, reported on the portal, was said to have occurred in April 2024 in the Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve, located at the junction of the Eastern and Western Ghats.

While the government insists that its conservation policies have bolstered the elephant population and successfully brought down poaching cases over the last two decades since Veerappan’s killing, conservationists are worried. A 2019 report by the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau highlighted oversights by the top brass of the Forest Department in the investigation of elephant poaching cases in a number of forest divisions including Megamalai, Valparai, Nilgiris, Coimbatore, and Theni. These include under-reporting of cases and the exclusion of buyers of ivory in the list of accused persons. Taking cognisance of the report, the Madras High Court in 2022 constituted a Special Investigation Team to probe 19 cases of elephant poaching in Tamil Nadu. In addition, a 2022 reply from the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change, sought under the Right to Information Act, 2005, stated that the elephant population had declined sharply between 2012 and 2017 — from over 4,000 to less than 2,800. In 2024, the government reported that the population had recovered to over 3,000 elephants.

Over the last few years, there have been concerns over the emergence of poaching groups that are targeting wildlife across the State, especially parts of the Nilgiris. There have been confirmed instances of the poaching of tigers in Tamil Nadu by groups from north India. Some cases of leopard poaching remain unsolved. The Forest Department is also said to be aware that inter-State poaching gangs are operating within the Nilgiris district, hunting wild game meat, and is working with counterparts in Kerala to clampdown on these groups.

According to activists, while poaching has drastically reduced thanks to increased surveillance by the Forest Department, structural reforms within the Department are needed. They say these will ensure transparency in the reporting of cases and better training of field staff to carry out thorough investigations to ensure convictions, thereby eliminating the need to use force to elicit confessions from accused persons.