The aggressive behaviour of wild elephants entering unprotected villages threatens the lives and properties of helpless villagers. The trouble and harm caused by wild elephants to people and vice versa are almost endless. Death tolls of humans and elephants from the conflicts were reported as 140 and 470 last year.
Rapid urbanisation, encroachment in to elephant habitats, conversion of forests for agriculture and other infrastructure development projects such as road infrastructure have disrupted the elephants’ traditional migration patterns and fragmented their hereditary habitats. Consequently, elephants are used to venturing in to human settlements leading to conflicts that endanger both elephant and human lives. Poverty stricken villagers who live in about 150 Divisional Secretary divisions in 18 districts except the Colombo, Gampaha, Kalutara, Kegalle, Galle, Matara and Jaffna districts, with the Anuradhapura district in the forefront are the most adversely affected by all this.
Dr. Sumith Pilapitiya
Strategies currently being used as solutions to the menace such as constructing electrified fences, digging protective fences, chasing wild elephants away, providing “Ali Wedi” to villagers and relocating problem causing elephants have their plus and minus points. The construction of electric fences, the solution that has proved to be the most successful, has been carried out in a number of Human Elephant Conflict (HEC) prone areas. There are instances reported where wild elephants had destroyed these fences. However, amid all these preventive measures incurring massive costs and labour during the past three decades, HEC caused human deaths stand at 2,300 and elephant casualties around 6,000.
In this unhealthy background, the then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointed a presidential committee to prepare a National Action Plan for human elephant conflict mitigation, with environmental scientist Dr. Prethiviraj Fernando, the Chairman of the Centre for Conservation and Research (CCR) as the head of the committee consisting of 13 members representing key stakeholder government institutions.
The Committee, appointed on July 20, 2020, conducted a review of all human elephant conflict mitigation methods in the country and internationally. Stakeholder consultations were held with the public and agencies and expressed views incorporated in the NAP. The National Action Plan was presented to the President in December 2020. Regrettably, no directive was given for the implementation of the recommendations of the NAP until October 2022. In view of the unsatisfactory state, on the direction of President Ranil Wickremesinghe, another Presidential Committee to facilitate and oversee the implementation of the National Action Plan prepared in 2020.
National Action Plan
The human-elephant conflict is widespread in Sri Lanka and currently reported from over half of the country including the entire dry zone. The previous approach to elephant management and human elephant conflict mitigation was formulated in 1959 and prescribed limiting elephants to designated wildlife department protected areas. In spite of dedicated efforts by the Wildlife Conservation Department after more than 60 years of pursuing this goal, today 70 percent of elephant range is in areas with resident people.
Intensifying efforts limiting elephants to so-called protected areas is unlikely to succeed and will cause conflict go from bad to worse. As such, the Action Plan recommends a change in the approach to human-elephant conflict mitigation based on wider stakeholder participation and prioritising protection of settlements and cultivation from elephants’ depredation.
A number of programs is proposed to provide immediate relief to the affected public from elephant depredation including constructing community based electric fences such as village and paddy field fences to prevent elephants from entering and causing damage to settlements and crop fields.
Also the existing electric fences with elephants on both sides are to be relocated to the boundary of areas used by elephants. It is recommended that activities that may increase conflict such as elephant drives be minimised or discontinued.
Also illegal activities that increase conflict such as encroachment of state land and livestock grazing in protected areas are to be prevented. The chena cultivation too, shall be discouraged, the NAP has recommended.
Now, the second Presidential Committee appointed on October 19, 2022, chaired by the former Wildlife Director General Dr. Sumith Pilapitiya is confronting limitations to facilitate and oversee the implementation of the recommendations of the Prithiviraj committee’s NAP for human-elephant conflict mitigation.
Lack of funds
It is learnt that there is no allocation in the national budget for the implementation of the National Action Plan. The Pilapitiya Presidential Committee has decided to concentrate on the implementation of NAP in the Kurunegala and Anuradhapura districts. According to Dr. Sumith Pilapitiya, the two districts have a high intensity of the human-elephant conflict and low protected area coverage leaving large landscapes that are shared by humans and elephants.
The other reason is that some donor funded projects such as ESCAMP (Eco System Conservation and Management Project), CSIAP (Climate Smart Irrigated Agriculture Project) being funded by the World Bank and ADB funded Mahaweli Water Security Investment Program are being implemented in the two districts with funding allocations for the implementation of key programs such as community based permanent village electric fences and seasonal paddy field electric fences.
Under these circumstances, the second Presidential Committee has to depend on the availability of funds from other projects funded by bilateral and multi-lateral funding agencies, which is still undecided. It is learnt that the ESCAMP funds have been exhausted in May 2023.
However, the Pilapitiya Presidential Committee is hopeful that the construction of 261 paddy field electric fences covering around 77,854 hectares of cultivated land in two districts would be patronised by ESCAMP, CSIAP and MWISP as being desired, pending adequate government funds.
It is understood that there has been a tug-of-war among committee members with regard to taking to the paddy filed and the village electric fence model or continuing with the customary linear electric fence which is less expensive and not complicated. Some members said that linear electric fences have, sometimes, proved a failure only because of the majority of the long distanced linear fences have been constructed not in conformity to the accepted standards and deviating from the appropriate geographic and geological scale due to unwarranted influences.
