Since February of this year, hundreds of copies of the elephant census report, Status of Elephant in India 2022–23, from the Environment Ministry have been collecting dust. The report has not been made public by the administration, which cited a Northeastern census delay.
The elephant population has decreased by 20% in the last five years, according to statistics from the undisclosed report that The Indian Express examined. In the Central Indian and Eastern Ghats, the decline is particularly concerning, since it is 41% lower than estimates from 2017.
The confidential assessment notes that there has been a decline in the population of elephants and names “mushrooming developmental projects” such “unmitigated mining and linear infrastructure construction” as major risks to the species.
The ministry stated that this is an interim report when approached. It stated that by the end of June 2025, the final report—which will include an estimate of the number of elephants in the northeast—should be ready.
Every five years, the ministry’s independent Wildlife Institute of India (WII) conducts an elephant census. The unreleased research, produced by seven scientists and officials of the Dehradun-based WII and its nodal ministry in New Delhi, is the first-ever “scientific” estimate of India’s elephant population.
Within the elephant population decline observed in the Central Indian and Eastern Ghats cluster, the states of Southern West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Orissa had the greatest losses, accounting for 84%, 68%, and 54% of the total, respectively. Approximately 1,700 elephants were lost in these three areas; of them, up to 400 may have relocated to neighbouring states like Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh.
The Western Ghats landscape could decline by up to 18%, mostly as a result of Kerala’s elephant population declining by around 2,900 (or 51%), compared to the 2017 revised estimate. Only the northern population of Shivalik hills and Gangetic plains appeared stable with a marginal 2 per cent drop.
The report’s figures for the Northeast are extrapolated from the previous count in 2017, when the region’s 10,139 elephants accounted for a third of the country’s overall elephant population of 29,964. This is because the modelling of elephant density in the Northeastern states was delayed due to “extremely limited” primary data.
“Since there was no deadline in sight for the Northeast and because we were already late for the five-year cycle, it was decided to publish the report for the rest of India and later add a volume for the Northeast. But there was a change of plan at the last minute. Formally, we have been told to wait for the Northeast data,” said a wildlife scientist working with the project.
The news agency reached out to Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav on why the report, printed in February, was not released. In response, the ministry said in a statement, “An interim draft report was prepared by WII. However, it did not have a uniform methodology and results, especially for the Northeastern states… (where) the estimation… is expected to be completed by WII next year and a report is expected by the end of June 2025. The process involves new methods including DNA profiling and camera traps which was not done by WII in the Northeast region due to paucity of time and required training and other logistics.”
On the significant drop in the elephant numbers in the east-central and southern landscapes, the ministry said: “This is an ongoing exercise and the progress of the same is being reviewed regularly in the Ministry at various levels. The ongoing exercise uses a framework that is used for the monitoring of Tigers, co-predators and prey… (which) is different from the All India Synchronized Elephant Population Estimation 2017.
Celebrating Elephant Day on August 12, Minister Yadav had tweeted: “The elephant population in India continues to be stable.”
While Ramesh Pandey, director of Project Elephant and one of the seven authors of the unreleased report, said he was away on training, WII’s Qamar Qureshi, the lead author, and his co-author WII director Virendra Tiwari did not respond to requests for comments.
Claiming that even the Northeast population will undergo “a rationalisation by 20-25%” when modelled properly, a senior elephant researcher described as “illogical” the ministry’s “reluctance” to accept the numbers for the rest of India, which, he said, should not be compared with the figures thrown up by past counts.
“Until 2017, we relied on either direct (head) count or indirect (dung) count of elephants. This time, we are attempting statistical modelling based on mark-recapture, as we have already done for tigers and leopards, to get reliable baseline data for elephants. So the gap in numbers doesn’t necessarily mean we lost that many elephants in just four to five years. It’s a reality check that elephants have not been doing well for quite some time,” he explained.
The report urged future strategies to be aligned with the goals of strengthening corridors and connectivity, restoring habitat, enhancing protection, mitigating developmental projects, and ensuring the support of local communities for elephant conservation.
Specifically, the report highlighted the fragmentation of the east-central landscape by “unmitigated mining and linear infrastructure construction” which “has prompted long-ranging elephants to venture into historical range, but currently unoccupied areas,” fuelling human-elephant conflicts. Poaching, railway collisions, and electrocution by power lines are the other threats identified in this landscape.
The report also warned that the once-contiguous elephant population in the Western Ghats — southern Maharashtra to Kerala — is “rapidly disconnecting due to changing land use, including expanding commercial plantations (coffee and tea), farmland fencing, human encroachment and mushrooming developmental projects.”
Even the relatively stable Shivalik-Terai population in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, the report noted, “confronts significant threats… from encroachments, forest clearing, monoculture, and invasive species” as well as intensified agriculture and linear infrastructure.
In the Northeast, the report found that the elephant populations are scattered in a mosaic dominated by human habitations, tea plantations, mines, oil refineries and linear infrastructure, making their movements and lives precarious. The report also identified poaching for ivory as a major threat in this landscape.
The report requested a “focused estimation exercise… to comprehensively assess occupancy and abundance to devise specific conservation actions,” which may allude to the lack of reliable data in the Northeast.
A wildlife biologist stationed in Assam pointed out that the elephant confronts enormous issues outside “a few islands” of protection. These areas are frequently tiger reserves. In Assam, take Kaziranga and Manas as examples. In Karnataka, Nagarhole and Bandipur; in Uttarakhand, Corbett. However, a species that travels great distances cannot survive in such areas,” he stated.
