More than 500 people and 100 elephants die every year due to conflict with each other, the environment ministry said ahead of World Elephant Day on August 12.

As per the last census conducted in 2017, India is home to around 30,000 elephants.

Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar released a booklet on best practices of human-elephant conflict management and launched a beta version of a portal.

World Elephant Day

World Elephant Day is celebrated on August 12. It is an international annual event dedicated to the preservation and protection of elephants.  The goals of World Elephant Day are:

• Work towards better protection for wild elephants.

• Improve enforcement policies to prevent the illegal poaching and trade of ivory.

• Conserve elephant habitats.

• Better treatment for captive elephants.

• When appropriate, reintroduce captive elephants into natural, protected sanctuaries to create awareness on elephant conservation.

• To share knowledge and positive solutions for the better protection and management of wild and captive elephants.

Elephants in India

Elephant was declared as the Natural Heritage Animal of India in 2010.

The current population estimates indicate that there are about 50,000-60,000 Asian elephants in the world. More than 60 per cent of the population is in India.

Asian elephants are listed as “Endangered" on the IUCN Red List of threatened species. 

Indian Elephant has also been listed in the Appendix I of the Convention of the Migratory species in the recently concluded Conference of Parties of CMS 13 at Gandhinagar, Gujarat in February 2020.

Portal on human-elephant conflict

A beta version of the national portal on human-elephant conflict (HEC)  called Surakhsya was launched. 

It is for collection of real time information. Managing the conflicts on a real time basis will help to set the data collection protocols, data transmission pipelines and data visualisation tools to enable policy makers to leverage HEC data for policy formulation and for preparation of action plans for mitigation of conflicts.

At present, the beta version of the portal is launched for data testing before pan India rollout for adoption by the states, which is likely to be done before year end.

Project Elephant

Project Elephant (PE) was launched by the government in 1992 as a centrally sponsored scheme with the following objectives: 

• To protect elephants, their habitat and corridors.

• To address issues of man-elephant conflict.

• Welfare of domesticated elephants.

India has the largest number of wild Asian Elephants, estimated at 29,964 according to the 2017 census by Project Elephant.

There are 30 notified elephant reserves in the country.

India has approximately 2,675 captive elephants.