Guwahati, May 20: Four elephant reserves of the Northeast, including two in Assam, have caught the attention of the Nairobi-based Monitoring Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE), a highly-rated international agency working in the field of elephant conservation.
The four elephant reserves that have come under the organisation?s scanner are Chirang-Ripu and Dibru in Assam, Deomali in Arunachal Pradesh and the Garo Hills elephant reserve in Meghalaya. Six other elephant reserves elsewhere in the country have been included in the programme.
MIKE functions under the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. The decision to spread its wings to the Northeast was taken at a workshop in Delhi recently.
The monitoring organisation will start implementing its programme in South Asia soon and has chosen India as chairman of the sub-regional steering committee. The programme envisages recording levels and trends of illegal hunting of elephants and trade in ivory. The programme has been a great success in eastern Africa.
Official statistics reveal that of the 28,000 elephants in the country, 33 per cent are in the Northeast. The elephant population in Assam, however, decreased from 5,524 in 1993 to 5,312 in 1997, when the last census was conducted.
Officials say there has been a significant decline in the elephant population in central Assam and that the animal has virtually vanished from the southern part of the state. Massive deforestation has robbed elephants of their prime habitat.
Incidents of mass poisoning of elephants in Sonitpur district in 2001 ? the result of a man-elephant conflict ? led conservationists to raise doubts about the future of the species in the entire region.
The elephant population in Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh is 1,840 and 1,607, according to official figures.
S.S. Bisht, director of Project Elephant, said the Northeast accounted for 20 per cent of poaching incidents in the country. ?Many instances of elephants being killed for ivory go undetected. Ninety per cent of elephant-poisoning incidents, 30 per cent of deaths because of electrocution and 60 per cent of casualties in train hits take place in the region.?
The MIKE programme has three components ? population surveys, law-enforcement monitoring and data analysis. Law-enforcement monitoring involves assessing the efforts made by protection staff, including the number of patrolling hours, prosecutions and utilisation of funds.
The significance of the programme in India lies in the fact that South Africa, Botswana and Namibia have received permission for limited trading in ivory after May 2004, subject to certain conditions that MIKE would provide benchmark information about the Asian elephant population.