New Delhi: Twenty-nine elephants were electrocuted in Kerala in the past five years, the government informed Parliament on Monday. As per the data, the country lost 528 jumbos in the last five years due to unnatural causes, including poaching, poisoning, electrocution, and train accidents,
In the same peiod, however, 124 people lost their lives due to elephant attacks in the state, Union Minister of State for Environment Kirti Vardhan Singh told the Lok Sabha in response to a question by BJP MPs Jayanta Kumar Roy and Sangeeta Kumari Singh Deo.
The minister said that 392 elephants died from electrocution and 73 were killed in train accidents during the past five years. Fifty elephants were killed by poachers and 13 succumbed to poisoning, he said.
According to the government data tabled in the Lok Sabha, 71 elephants died due to electrocution in Odisha, 55 in Assam, 52 in Karnataka, 49 in Tamil Nadu, 32 in Chhattisgarh and 30 in Jharkhand.
Assam and Odisha recorded 22 and 16 elephant deaths in train accidents. Poachers killed 17 pachyderms in Odisha, 14 in Meghalaya, and 10 in Tamil Nadu. Ten elephants were poisoned in Assam, two in Chhattisgarh, and one in West Bengal.
According to the last elephant census conducted in 2017, India has 29,964 elephants, which is around 60 per cent of their global population.
Data presented in Parliament last week revealed that human-elephant conflict resulted in 2,853 human deaths in India over the last five years, with the number of fatalities reaching a five-year high of 628 in 2023.
"Elephants caused" 587 human deaths in 2019, 471 in 2020, 557 in 2021, 610 in 2022, and 628 in 2023.
The data revealed that Odisha recorded 624 such deaths during this period, Jharkhand 474, West Bengal 436, Assam 383, Chhattisgarh 303, Tamil Nadu 256, Karnataka 160, and Kerala 124.
