Villagers in Assam set up separate food zones to reduce human-elephant conflict
The villagers of Assam have launched a new and unique initiative to create separate feeding areas for wild elephants to reduce human-elephant conflict in the state.
The villagers of Nagaon district in Assam have come up with a unique idea of creating separate food zones for wild jumbo to reduce the conflict between humans and elephants.
To protect the rice crop and keep themselves away from wild elephant conflict, the villagers have decided to create separate feeding areas for the wild elephants.
In Assam, human-elephant conflicts often result in deaths of both elephants and humans as the state leads to human-elephant conflicts each year resulting in loss of life and property destruction.
For the past three years, villagers in central Assam districts like Hatikhali and Ronghang have been creating separate feeding areas for wild elephants in their area so that the elephants do not destroy their paddy fields.
Significantly, more than 600 villagers in those areas have given up their 33 acres of land only to whitewash the wild elephant paddy crop. He has also planted various jackfruit saplings, banana saplings and elephant apple saplings for wild grapefruit and 400 bighas of forest land has been used for wild elephants in hilly areas.
Hungry wild elephants often come down from the hills in search of food and damage the paddy fields grown by the farmers, they eat the paddy grown by the farmers for a long time. There are many cases of farmers being killed in clashes between humans and wild elephants.
Villagers believe that the move to separate food zones has been very successful in protecting their rice crop from wild elephants and has also helped reduce human-elephant conflict. Vinod Dulu Bora, an environmentalist and local youth, said the villagers started this separate feeding place for elephants in 2019.
Earlier, about 10-15 people and 10-13 wild elephants have died due to human-elephant clashes, but no casualties have been reported in the last three years, according to Bora. He further said that in 2021, the villagers of 70-80 areas of Thuramukh, Numaligarh have been able to save their paddy crop by creating separate food space for wild elephants.
According to the Assam Forest Department, a total of 612 people have been killed in human-elephant clashes in different parts of Assam in the last ten years.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by News East India staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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