One matured female elephant got killed and the other pregnant one was injured and gave birth a male elephant cub while limping on her way back to Rani Reserve forest in the wee hours of Sunday. The forest guards later rescued the baby elephant from the forest and the found the mother in injured condition. A tusker died in a similar fashion at the same spot last year. Deepor Beel is a permanent freshwater lake located south-west of Guwahati city.
Speeding trains in the Deepor Beel region have reportedly killed 31 elephants since1998. In Assam, 45 deaths have been reported in the last 19 years, most of which were on the track laid through the Rani-Garbhanga forest reserve near the lake Deepor Beel “The speed limit near the Deepor Beel area is 20 kmph. But in reality it has not been observed in this stretch of railway track“said by a local resident.
Rani and Garbhanga reserve, the twin reserve forests have the distinction of providing shelter to a wide variety of wild mammals like leopards, the slow lorris, the Assamese macaque and elephants. Even some of the rare animals, including the hillock- gibbon, the royal Bengal tiger and the bison can be spotted here. The reserve forests are close to the Meghalaya border on one side and Deepor-beel Bird Sanctuary on the other, which provide 60 to 70 km of natural corridor at a stretch between the two forests. For the big mammals like elephants, royal Bengal tigers and leopards the reserve forests constitute an ideal breeding place for them.
Several NGO, however, expressed concern over the present state of affairs and large-scale deforestation in these forests endangering the wild animals here. It cautioned the State Forest department that if steps were not initiated right now, the wild resources in the forests would be on the verge of extinction in the near future.Â
India is home to 60 per cent of the Asian elephant population making their survival in the country critical to the survival of the species. According to Project Elephant, a government initiative for elephant conservation since 1992, there were 27,694 elephants in the country in 2007-08, a rise of 12,067 since 1980. Wildlife experts, however, refuse to buy these claims saying that these numbers refer to protected areas only.
Even the Project Elephant report shows that Assam has lost 243 elephants since 1993. Not surprising in a state where the forest cover saw a net decrease of 90 sq km.
In Rani-Garbhanga reserve forest, increasing deforestation has forced them to move out of their habitats to adjoining regions dissected by the Jogighopa-Guwahati tracks. The physical reasons include steep embankments on either side of the tracks and sharp turns with poor visibility. Elephants accidentally descend on the tracks and due to their size get trapped between embankments. In the Deepor Beel area, the gap between tracks and the embankments is less than two meters.
Source: Samsul Huda Patgiri, Sr. Photo Journalist, Photographic Society of Assam.
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