The Assam Haathi project
Rughly 50,000 Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) live across 13 countries in south and southeast Asia – less than half of the number that roamed this part of the world at the start of the 19th Century. With forest habitats rapidly disappearing and farmlands expanding, crops make a tempting alternative source of food to elephants. This has led to competition and conflict with people. The Assam Haathi Project is designed to reduce elephant persecution and protect the livelihoods of people in this region.
India holds 60% of the global Asian elephant population. Their wild habitats have become fragmented as the country undergoes rapid change; India’s human population is growing, and its infrastructure is expanding fast. This forces elephants to traverse human inhabited areas, bringing them closer to people than ever before.
As high calorie human food sources like crop fields abound, many elephants, especially lone males, take to such alternatives as their food of choice. Elephants regularly foraging on human crops or damaging other human property such as homes or granaries, has led to flare up of aggression on both sides as people seek to protect their crops from raiding, and elephants contend with closer contact with people as they try to access these rich food resources.
At least 500 people die each year, in India alone, as a direct result of conflict with elephants, while millions of pounds worth of crops and other property are also lost, often affecting people already in poverty.
Retaliatory persecution conversely, leads to 60-100 elephant deaths annually; many are poisoned or electrocuted.
Asian elephants are classified as Endangered and exhibiting a declining population trend, according to the IUCN Red List. This status has not changed for more than 40 years, and persecution is undermining conservation efforts. It has become a primary cause of elephant population declines across Asia, and is now a greater threat than ivory poaching, which is now heavily policed.
The state of Assam holds the second largest population of elephants in India. Around a third of its three million people live in poverty, relying on subsistence agriculture to survive. The region is also a hotspot for deaths, injuries and damage caused by human-elephant conflict.
The Assam Haathi project, a partnership between the Wildlife Trust of India, Chester Zoo and local people, focusses on understanding and managing conflicts between people and elephants. It helps local communities coexist with elephants by identifying and reducing the drivers of elephant crop-raiding and retaliatory attacks by people.
Communities are at the core of the Assam Haathi project, which supports both practical and social solutions. For instance, in the Greater Manas landscape of the state, where the elephant population has made a comeback, the project has taken a holistic approach to manage potentially negative human-elephant interactions and promote inter-species coexistence.
The project helped communities build and maintain elephant proof fences – culminating in a 24-kilometre-long fence entirely built and managed by local people. While the fence has reduced elephant forays into the fringe villages by around 70%, a few elephants work out how to break through. To ward off these individuals, a body of primary responders called ‘Baba Bandhu’ (Friends of Elephants in the local Bodo dialect), provide a second line of defence.
The Baba Bandhu - roughly 50 volunteers - keep a watch on any elephants that may have breached the fence and entered the village areas and carefully drive them back to the forests. Their extensive knowledge of elephants is supplemented with planning and practical support from WTI and Chester Zoo.
The Baba Bandhus also assess the damaged sections of fences and ensure these are repaired swiftly by appointed fence technicians. Four permanent watchtowers provide Baba Bandhu members safe vantage points when keeping watch for elephants or when driving them back.
Chester Zoo and WTI work with the understanding that many in elephant-adjacent communities are dependent upon forest resources, especially timber and fuelwood, for their entire livelihoods.
Over the years the project has supported nearly 400 such households to adopt more sustainable livelihoods, These provide higher and more consistent earnings, and are less risky, as workers do not need to enter the forests as frequently.
This facet of the Assam Haathi project has seen 98% of these households completely free themselves from dependence on fragile forest resources. Additionally, it also targets the local eateries and restaurants using fuelwood extracted from these areas, encouraging them to adopt more efficient stoves. In the first phase, six eateries abandoned forest wood as their sole source of cooking fuel, and we intend to expand this initiative further.
Lastly the project nurtures the younger generation to become nature conservation stewards in the region. Over the next few years, the aim is to develop a cadre of wild scouts, beginning with three or four local schools.
By engaging young people with the project, we hope the positive changes continue to develop, allowing elephants and people to coexist sustainably into the future.
Specialists
Find out more about the conservation experts who work on this project.
Head of Field Programmes
Regional Field Programme Manager - Mainland Asia