BHUBANESWAR: Elephant census in the state will be carried out next year, after a gap of seven years. The enumeration will be held during the summer, as usual. A day after the Forest department announced to conduct its own tiger estimation, it said modalities will be set in a month.
“The state government has decided to conduct the elephant census during summer next year. Process for the same will be initiated within a month,” said PCCF (Wildlife) and chief wildlife warden SK Popli.
He said the wildlife wing of the Forest department will soon prepare an SOP for the same and submit it to the government for approval by next month.
The Forest department is sitting on elephant census for the last six years despite the need for early completion of the exercise to work out a better conservation plan. Odisha used to conduct its own elephant census every two years. It, however, was not done in 2019 and subsequently put on hold following the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020.
In the last census undertaken way back in 2017, the state recorded a head count of 1,976, a marginal rise from the previous census figure of 1,954 in 2015. Large-scale poaching, including those in protected areas of Similipal Tiger Reserve, has triggered apprehensions about the jumbo population in the state.
The state has lost at least 509 elephants in the last six years between 2017-18 and 2022-23 owing to various reasons including poaching, poisoning, electrocution, road accidents and train collisions. At least 86 elephants perished in the state in 2021-22 while another 93 died in 2022-23. Forest officials said field-level preparations for the enumeration exercise of the gentle giants will be started as soon as the SOP is finalised. They said the elephant census may take place towards May 2024.
The officials said for the tiger estimation to be carried out in October this year, the department is planning to adopt both line-transect and the camera trap method for better counting.The decision to conduct its tiger enumeration came after the All India Tiger Estimation (AITE) - 2022 report, released by National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) on Saturday, put the state’s big cat figure at just 20 compared to previous estimation of 28 in 2018.