Asian elephants in the Western Ghats live cheek-by-jowl with cultivation and human dwellings. Conflict, which undermines the well-being of  both people and elephants, is often the result. Our project, designed as a conservation experiment, strived to understand and reduce conflicts around Bandipur Tiger Reserve. 

Growing conflict with people is a serious challenge to the survival of elephants. People living and farming at the fringes of elephant habitat face great risk to life and livelihood from elephants. At the same time, pervasive pressures on forests, often by the same beleaguered communities, degrades elephant habitat, aggravating their tendency to seek food in crop fields. Efforts of park managements to restrict access of local communities to forest-based resources while denying them alternate benefits of conservation and expecting them to bear conservation costs, has deepened resource-conflicts into serious park-people antagonism. Such antagonism, often expressed as retaliatory killing of elephants, undermines elephant conservation.  As people and elephants spiral down this dangerous vortex, we must ask: is this not avoidable?

Between 2007 and 2012, NCF’s team set out to work with farming communities around Bandipur to understand conflicts and help reduce them. We tried to understand how these farmers interacted among themselves, with their neighbouring forests, with the elephants that regularly visited them, and the consequences of such interactions for them. Over five years, we monitored conflicts across 4,000 acres of farmland in 18 villages around Bandipur, recording over 5,000 incidents of crop loss. Our investigations suggested that the challenge in reducing crop losses lay in creating effective local institutions to oversee conflict alleviation at a local scale.

We worked in partnership with farmers to help establish a Farmers’ Collective. Here, NCF played the role of a service provider by raising the capital to install an electric fence. The Collective could then function profitably by raising all maintenance and replacement costs for the fence from farmers themselves. Hence, for a fraction of the costs previously borne, farmers could achieve total protection of their crops from wildlife.

Initial success in Bandipur resulted in Hasiru Raitha Okkoota expanding from 11 families to 60 families thereby increasing the community area protected from 20 acres to over 110 acres.