Bibek Debroy: The bee in an elephant bonnet

Why elephants continue to be mowed down and nothing seems to change

Goilkera is in West Singhum district of Jharkhand. That's where the Saranda forest is. If you have visited the National Railway Museum in New Delhi, you have seen the skull of an elephant. In September 1894, this elephant tried to cross the railway track and UP Mail ran into him. The elephant died. One tusk is in London, in what used to be the office of the East India Railway Company. Another tusk was claimed by James Bell, the engine-driver. The rest of the skull is in National Railway Museum.

The number of wild elephants in India is around 30,000. (There was an increase between 2007 and 2012.) They usually live in 28 elephant reserves, but they also have right of passage through human habitation, known as elephant corridors. Of these elephant corridors, 138 are intra-state, 28 inter-state and 17 involve Bangladesh, Bhutan, Mynamar and Nepal and are international. The train with the longest route is Vivek Express, from Dibrugarh to Kanyakumari - a distance of 4,273 km covered in 80-82 hours. (The time is a function of whether it is an 'up' train or a 'down' train.) As train speeds in India go, that's not too bad - 52-53 km/hour. But three and a half days does seem awfully long, even for such a large country. In either direction, you reach your destination on the fifth day from the day of boarding.

If you ask someone from the Indian Railways (IR) why it takes that long, there would be a mention of Chicken's Neck, the Siliguri Corridor. One of those elephant corridors is between Siliguri and Alipurduar - a distance of 161 km. But this isn't a continuous stretch. It has 20 separate segments, ranging from 4 km for Bagrakot-Oodlabari to 13 km for Sivok-Bagrokat and Chalsa-Nagrakata. Metre gauge to broad gauge conversion occurred in 2003 (specifically between 2002 and 2004) and there is some evidence that elephant deaths increased after conversion. Both speed and frequency of trains increased after gauge conversion. I haven't seen IR use its guard elephant mascot, Bholu, for a long time. Despite the mascot, trains do kill elephants and along this stretch, most accidents occur at night.

There is a public interest litigation pending before the Supreme Court. What does the court want IR to do? Stop freight trains from plying at night, develop alternative routes (such as between New Jalpaiguri and New Alipurduar), reduce speeds to 25 km/hour etc and the West Bengal (and Assam) forest department agrees. Conservationists want non-goods express trains to also stop during the night. Data, for what it is worth, shows more elephants are killed by express trains than goods trains.

On the Vivek Express point, IR hasn't implemented the 25 km/hour order. Therefore, elephants can't be blamed for the three and a half days. Fast trains cover 161 km in a little over two hours - that's almost 80 km/hour. That's better than what Vivek Express clocks elsewhere, in other segments. So far at least, delays have not been caused by elephants, but by capacity problems on IR's network. For elephants, IR wants under-passes, over-passes, fencing, segregation of track. It is possible to sympathise with the Northeast Frontier Railway. Those conditions make it impossible to build connectivity with the Northeast, until something happens with Bangladesh (for instance, the proposed Tetulia Corridor as an alternative to the Siliguri Corridor).

Despite that sympathy, it is difficult to empathise with IR's suggestions. Fencing and segregation of tracks are either non-starters, or prohibitively expensive. Under-passes and over-passes for elephants? I have heard (and seen) such things for elk, deer and sheep. I have read about an elephant under-pass in Kenya. But do such things work for elephants? (The one in Kenya works because a nine-mile-long corridor was fenced in. That project cost $1 million.) At the last hearing, the Supreme Court was contemptuous of the idea. "Why not put up a road sign as well to inform elephants about these safe passages?" was the court's comment.

At a recent meeting, I heard Prime Minister Narendra Modi say, "Have you thought of bees?" That's a better idea than under-passes and over-passes and cheaper too. Pachyderms hate bees and beehive fences have been tried out all over Africa, including Kenya, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as in Sri Lanka. You hang hives, or even dummy hives, from these fences. If an elephant touches a hive, or the connecting wire, hives release bees. If local material is used, hives don't cost much. In addition, one can plant flowering trees and get honey as a by-product. In some experiments, even artificial sounds, resembling buzzing of bees, have been able to scare away elephants. However, I don't yet know of experiments that use bees to keep elephants away from railway tracks. The elephant-bee projects in Africa and Sri Lanka are primarily about protecting crops. That doesn't mean the idea can't be adapted to cater to IR's needs. Unfortunately, IR's decision-making process is such that it is immune to out-of-the-box ideas. It has boxed itself in and that should be in the bee in our bonnets, if not in the elephant's.

The writer is a member of the National Institution for Transforming India Aayog. The views are personal