Prof Raman Sukumar, Chairman of Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc, on Monday said minimising man-elephant conflict is a challenging task.
Delivering the Vijay Anand Memorial Lecture, he said elephants may come out of forests various reasons, including shrinking of forest cover and food. He added that man elephant-confict seems to be a problem all over. “India has more elephants than China and the country has 60 per cent of the World’s Asian elephants. Elephants have been sacred from the time of the Indus civilization,” he remarked.
He said elephants are found near riversides and dams, plantations, bridges, etc that come with development programs destroy habitats. “They get better food outside national parks. Elephants inside parks look skeletal..... Sometimes, it makes sense to capture elephants, but they have to be treated well and not abused in captivity,” he observed.
Prof Sukumar released ‘Science of elephants in the Silicon Valley,’ a book on elephants written by Surendra Verma, Nishanth M S, Dr Gopalakrishna, Avinash Krishnan and Padmamala Rajagopalan.