The conditions that led to the death of a tourist from Chennai at the popular Dubare elephant camp in Karnataka’s Kodagu beg serious attention. The incident occurred when 26-year-old tusker Kanjan attacked a 56-year-old tuskless bull elephant, Marthanda, at the camp abutting the Cauvery. It caused the latter to fall and fatally crush the woman tourist, who, along with her husband and three-year-old daughter, was standing close to the elephants to watch them being bathed. Video grabs show the woman’s husband making futile attempts at pulling her from under the 4,500-kg Marthanda with one hand while carrying the daughter in the other. The severely injured Marthanda, too, died later that day.
The absence of safety protocols and emergency facilities at Dubare and the other elephant camps is shocking—especially as these camps attract thousands of tourists, including women, children and the elderly, to watch the pachyderms being bathed, to play with them, and to get photographed with them. In a knee-jerk reactive measure, the state government has barred the entry of tourists into elephant camps until further orders, and constituted a committee to list standard operating procedures as safety protocols. There are plans not to allow tourists within 100 feet of the elephants. It must be heeded that only proactive measures and strict official accountability can prevent such tragedies.
The elephants in the 10 camps under the state forest department are trained and ‘domesticated’. Yet, this tragedy exposed huge inadequacies in dealing with tourists’ safety. Most captive elephants are captured and are known to exhibit unpredictable behaviour. The same Kanjan had run amok during rehearsals of the Mysuru Dasara festival a few years ago. Why, then, were tourists allowed near him? It must also be noted that Karnataka—which has 114 captive elephants in 10 camps, besides 31 with temples and mutts—hosts the largest wild elephant population in India, with 6,013 elephants, according to the first nationwide DNA-based census conducted by the Wildlife Institute of India last year, followed by Assam (4,159), Tamil Nadu (3,136), Kerala (2,785) and Uttarakhand (1,792). And human-elephant conflict is increasingly common in all these states.
As elephant populations grow due to conservation efforts and human habitats extend into wildlife domains, stringent safety protocols and standard operating procedures should be devised and implemented. Failing this, there will be little to prevent another such incident from claiming innocent lives.
