Wild elephants rampage villages for rice beer : India

By Syed Zarir Hussain

Guwahati, June 30 - Herds of wild elephants are running amok in Assam, damaging vast swathes of crops and also mud and thatch huts as they move out of their jungles to look for rice beer in human settlement areas in northeastern India.

The raids by the pachyderms have resulted in at least five people losing their lives during the past two months. Wildlife officials are in a quandary as the huge animals feast on the farmlands - mainly rice fields and sugarcane cultivations.

The latest raid by herds of wild pachyderms took place in the eastern district of Golaghat.

'The villagers saw the elephant herd and fled their homes fearing for their lives. The same herd is terrorising people in nearby villages as well, damaging their crops and properties,' said Haridhan Tanti, a community elder of Soutali village in Golaghat.

Angry over the elephant attacks, villagers Thursday locked the local forest office alleging the officials were indifferent in chasing away the herd.

'This is a real problem. We are doing our best to ward off such marauding herds, but then it is not possible to deploy forest officials in each and every village to keep track of the elephants,' a senior wildlife warden said.

During the past two months, the wild elephants herds have been wreaking havoc in several parts of Assam with the pachyderms fancying harvested rice stalks and the 'moonshine' country liquor that many of the villagers brew from fermented rice.

'We have noticed that elephants really relish guzzling rice beer which many tribal people and tea garden workers ferment at home,' Kushal Konwar Sharma, a noted elephant expert and a teacher at the College of Veterinary Science in Guwahati, told IANS.

Experts say wild elephants have been moving out of the jungles with people encroaching upon the animal corridors. This in turn is leading to an increasing number of elephant attacks on villages.

'A shrinking forest cover and encroachment of elephant corridors have forced the pachyderms to stray out of their habitats to human settlement areas,' Sharma said.

In the past, villagers drove away marauding herds by beating drums or bursting firecrackers. Now with man-elephant conflict on the rise, they poison the animals.

In the last five years, elephants have killed at least 150 people in Assam.

Angry villagers, in turn, have killed up to 200 of the animals during the same period, some of which were brought down with poisoned-tipped arrows. The last elephant census in 1999 recorded 5,400 elephants in Assam, more than half of India's count of 10,000.