My Elephant in My Village

Submitted by srini on Tue, 01/07/2020 - 07:48

Summary

The proposed project aims to build upon our experience in dealing with human-elephant conflict in human-dominated areas by partnering with local communities and other civil societies. It addresses two key issues, human-elephant conflict and removal of male elephants from wild populations, which seriously affects our ongoing conservation efforts.

In order to mitigate these threats, our approach is to empower local communities and regional civil societies and individuals to create awareness among communities living alongside elephants, especially to address human-elephant conflict with site and context-specific strategies. Our long term vision is to change the current perception of “Your elephant and my village” to “ My elephant and my village”. Hence, investing in the training and capacity building of local stakeholders who can carry out conservation activities in the region along with Forest Department staff, we think, is the most effective way to ensure long-term protection to male elephants in a human-dominated landscape.

Objectives

Forming and training village-level teams to reduce loss of property and life
Training and implementation of site-specific farm-based practices to reduce loss of property and life
Establishment and maintenance of physical structures to reduce loss of property and life
Deploy technology to equip villagers with early warnings to reduce loss of property and life
Developing a framework for site-specific implementation of mitigation action plans at the level of a village

Status

We carried out questionnaire surveys to understand farming practices and identified activities that are incompatible with the elephant’s use of the area. We then developed possible mitigation measures for these activities.
We trained farmers who volunteered to be part of the village team to monitor and record elephant activity and crop damage in and around their villages.

With the help of the village team and forest staff, we identified paths that elephants are known to take to enter villages, and developed and installed an early-warning system along these routes. This early-warning system is being monitored by us as well as the village team. We are however experiencing certain lags in the system that we are working on rectifying.

We worked with farmers to construct a hanging-wire fence that encompassed multiple crop-fields where farmers had agreed to jointly carry out mitigation measures.

Over the next few months, we will work with farmers to help them attain a better price for their produce either by processing it or by connecting them to better markets.

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