Title - Central team takes stock of elephant deaths

BHUBANESWAR: Worried over the frequent incidents of elephant deaths in Odisha, the Centre on Saturday rushed two senior officials here to take stock of the situation.The two-member investigating official team comprising Additional Director General (Wildlife) S S Gabrial and IG (wildlife) A M Singh met forest minister Bijayashree Routray and discussed the elephant deaths, including the December 30 in which five elephants were run over by Coromandal Express at Subalaya in Ganjam district.Odisha in 2012 officially recorded nearly 60 elephants deaths, many due to electrocution and train hits. The team visited Subalaya, and spoke to the assistant executive engineer, Balugaon, representing the East Coast Railway and the local people. The officials wanted to meet the level-crossing gateman but he was not available.Official sources said, minister Bijayshree Routray during his talks blamed the railways for the elephant deaths. He also demanded the Centre to release Rs 32 crore from the CAMPA fund urgently which the state government had been demanding to spend on strengthening sagging power lines in areas visited by elephants.The railway engineer during his meeting with the two-member probe team maintained that the forest officials ought to have alerted them about the movement of the elephants 'at least two hours' in advance. He also said there was no instruction from the railway board to run trains at slow speed on track sections crossed by elephants.

The state government officials accompanying the team sought to deny allegations that poachers arrived at the spot soon after the accident and took away two tusks of the elephants. "Female elephants do not have tusks. There was only one male elephant and the tusks were intact," chief wildlife warden J D Sharma told TOI. Local people told the visiting officials to ensure that the elephants are chased away from their area as they had been destroying crops and attacking their houses.

Gabrial later said the team would submit its report to the MoEF soon. He expressed surprise why the railways had not been allowing trains to run slowly at identified elephant crossing points when similar practice is followed in Dehradun-Haridwar, Siliguri and some other places. The team chose not to join issues either with the state government or the railways, which had been shifting blames on each other for the deaths of one tusker, three female elephants and a calf. "We don't hold anyone responsible for the elephant deaths. We will submit our reports to the MoEF," Gabrial said.

Meanwhile, Biswajit Mohanty, member, National Board for Wildlife, in a letter to Union forest and environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan has demanded a thorough inquiry into whether the state government and the railways had actually assessed the ground situation and put in place preventive measures to save the elephants. "Though the forest department has been regularly holding meetings with the railways, nothing seems to have been done in the field to take preventive measures to stop such killings," Mohanty said.