COIMBATORE: Officials of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve (ATR) have come up with a new design to keep PDS commodities away from the reach of wild elephants. To try it out, they will soon build a model building on elevated pillars for the PDS shop at Thaimudi estate in Valparai which elephants would find difficult to reach.
If it proves successful, ATR officials will recommend to the Civil supplies department to construct similar buildings in human-elephant conflict-prone zones. This was decided in a stakeholders meeting convened by the ATR officials in which representatives from Municipality, revenue and Police along with estate managers took part in human-animal conflict mitigation measures, held on Monday.
The meeting was convened since the next three months are the migration period of elephants and there are high chances for negative interactions between humans and wild elephants.
Bhargava Teja, deputy director of ATR, said “We plan to allot a department vehicle exclusively to supply ration items to people in vulnerable areas. Through measures such as sending SMS and LED lights, we have reduced human death as well as injuries due to wild elephant attacks to zero between April 2021 and March 2022.
Ganesh Ragunathan, the research affiliate of NCF Valparai told TNIE that out of the 108 times in the last year that elephants damaged buildings in Valparai, a ration shop at Thaimudi estate was targetted more than ten times.
V Selvan Assistant Conservator of Forest (ACF) said ration shops function in old buildings and many are not even concrete structures and get damaged easily during elephant intrusions. A Manikandan, forest range officer of Manombolly, said they have requested the Valparai municipality officials to set up garbage bins in public between the town and Rottikadai since tourists are dumping waste in the open.
Municipality officials, meanwhile, requested the ATR officials to install boards detailing dos and dont’s for tourists to mitigate human-animal conflict between Monkey falls and Valparai.