PROJECT ELEPHANT

At the 16th Steering Committee meeting of Project Elephant, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change launched a field manual named-Field Manual for Managing Human-Elephant Conflicts (HEC) in India-to guide forest staffers dealing with HEC in major elephant range states.
The manual has been prepared by the ministry, along with the Wildlife Institute of India (WWI) and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF India).
It contains the detailed best practices of minimizing human-elephant conflict. It is drafted with the aim of providing forest officials/ departments and other stakeholders with guidance towards interventions to help mitigate Human Elephant Conflict, both in emergencies and when conflict poses a recurring challenge.

Current Data on Elephants in India:

India is home to approximately around 27,000 Asian Elephants, which is the world’s largest population of the species.
As per Elephant Census (2017), Karnataka has the highest number of elephants (6,049), followed by Assam (5,719) and Kerala (3,054).

Asian Elephants:

There are three subspecies of Asian elephant which are the Indian, Sumatran and Sri Lankan.
The Indian subspecies has the widest range and accounts for most of the remaining elephants on the continent.
The elephant herd is led by the oldest and largest female member (known as the matriarch). This herd includes the daughters of the matriarch and their offspring.
Elephants have the longest-known gestational (pregnancy) period of all mammals, lasting up to 680 days (22 months).
Females between 14 – 45 years may give birth to calves approximately every four years with the mean interbirth intervals increasing to five years by age 52 and six years by age 60.
Global Population: Estimated 20,000 to 40,000.

African Elephants:

There are two subspecies of African elephants, the Savanna (or bush) elephant and the Forest elephant.
Global Population- Around 4,00,000.
Earlier in July 2020, Botswana (Africa) witnessed the death of hundreds of elephants.

Threats: