Lalitamma, 50, has had many sleepless nights over the last month as a tusker has taken to raiding her fields where the ripe corn is waiting to be harvested. For the next three months she and her son will have to guard their small field from the elephant and any other wild jumbos that may find the corn hard to resist.
The experience is common to every coffee planter and farmer of Alur where the man-elephant has reached such proportions now that farmers are asking for permission to shoot the animals that raid their crops every night. “We are actually rearing these wild elephants as their fodder is our crop and the coffee beans we grow. Please take them away from here,” pleads Lalitamma, echoing the sentiments of many other farmers in the area. While the region has always been home to elephants they began to come into conflict with the locals in the Eighties after the Harangi and Hemavathi dams submerged thousands of hectares of prime elephant habitat in the districts of Hassan and Coorg, leaving a herd of around 20 isolated. Having lost their migratory path to the nearby forests, the elephants took shelter in Alur taluk , Hassan district, but all that was left for them was 800 acres of the Doddabetta forest with no fodder to speak of.
With the tree plantations and the thick bamboo vegetation along the river Hemavathi too having been submerged under the waters of the dam, the elephants had little choice but to depend on the farms to fill their bellies. The result has been tragic as the last 10 years have claimed the lives of 19 villagers and seen 14 elephants killed by farmers trying to protect their crop from them.
To the dismay of the locals, the conflict which was restricted to a few villages on the backwaters of Hemavathi in Alur taluk is now slowly spreading to other villages and three more hoblis are seeing evidence of it on a regular basis. The high court took note of the growing conflict situation after two elephant calves were electrocuted in Alur last year and constituted an expert committee to suggest a way out. The forest department, meanwhile, received permission for mass relocation of elephants from the Union government, but its efforts to relocate two tuskers ended in failure last year as the animals found their way back to Alur from the state's border with Tamil Nadu where they had been taken.
Elephant experts are not surprised and warn relocation is not the answer. They also dont support capturing and taming the elephants, as they fear it could set an unhealthy trend. While the experts argue, the situation continues to beg a solution that is in the interests of both the people and the elephants that have no say in what becomes of them.