In recent times, there has been a spurt of elephant intrusions into human settlements and tea gardens in the Nilgiri Hills. For several decades, there were no major settlements at Kallar in the foothills of the Nilgiri Hills along the ghat road from Mettupalayam to Ooty other than the government horticultural farm and a few hutments amid acres of arecanut and banana plantations. Conflict between wild elephants and human beings was relatively unknown in the region. In the mid-1990s, a school (Satchidananda Jothi Niketan) was built inside the forest after clearing a large area despite protests by environmentalists. The electric fencing to protect the property from elephant intrusion has already electrocuted a few baby elephants, and people nowadays illegally feed their fences with direct power, causing a greater threat.
The setting up of the school, and settlements between the school gate adjacent to the Kallar railway crossing, changed the scene. The first to come was the watersport park, Black Thunder, and hotels and shops to cater to the swelling number of visitors. Farmland is being sold in bits and pieces to real estate builders, and new industries are emerging on forest land. The Tamil Nadu Green Movement has a list of such encroachments. The dwindling forest cover and mushrooming structures are best observed from either way up the ghat road or from an aircraft descending towards Coimbatore. Vistas of wide open fields stretching to the horizon along both sides of the Coimbatore-Mettupalayam highway have now metamorphosed into one large conglomeration of settlements.
The migratory corridor for elephants beginning near the Horticultural Garden at Kallar having contiguity with the Silent Valley National Park has been reduced to just about 800 m wide. Rampant encroachments and shrinking width of the elephant corridors are proving to be a disturbance for the movement of wild elephants between the Eastern and Western Ghats, forcing the animals to cross the Mettupalayam-Coonoor ghat road, holding back the traffic. Elephants have now entered tea gardens near Coonoor, presumably having lost their way due to the confusion caused by shrinking migratory routes.
Thirsty pachyderms now frequently stray on to the famed Nilgiri Mountain Railway route and damage water pipes at intermediate halts which serve to fill the tanks of the steam engine powering the train on the rack railway to Ooty. The train is then forced to retreat to Kallar from the first halt way up the ghat, and the travellers have to undergo an ordeal by road to reach Coonoor and Ooty!
Other elephant corridors under threat are at Thadagam, Ettimadai and Walayar, where several educational institutions and settlements have sprung up over the years. Because of their shrinking numbers, elephants stray and cause increased incidents of man-animal conflict. In this context, there is a proposal by the Tamil Nadu Forest Department to acquire land and restore the corridor near Kallar. Elephants from Silent Valley and Mudumalai use this route for migration.
As developmental projects in these regions are already posing a grave threat, more such projects would have an adverse impact if due steps are not taken. Forest officials have earmarked about 202 acres for creating an elephant corridor, consisting of mostly revenue and patta lands. Once the proposal is cleared, the government would notify their acquisition of the land and release compensation to the land owners. This is the second major initiative in the state after the efforts to restore the Kalhatti-Bokkapuram corridor near Ooty, which was officially finalised recently. Once the Kallar elephant corridor is restored, man-animal conflict is expected to be substantially reduced.
The writer is a Delhi-based freelance journalist/photographer