Since 2020 a group of ~24 wild elephants have migrated from Chhattisgarh to Maharashtra. While in the early days they were spending a couple of months in Maharashtra before heading back to Chhattisgarh, since July 2022 the elephants have remained in Maharashtra and it is anticipated that they will settle down in this region for the foreseeable future. This development is both an opportunity and challenge for the state. This is the first time in several decades that wild elephants are roaming the land and yet at the same time communities living in Gadchiroli, Gondia and the Bhandara districts are facing problems like crop loss, property damage and in a couple of unfortunate cases injury and death. The purpose of the project is to implement a variety of on-ground interventions to reduce human-elephant conflict and provide a safe habitat for the elephants. Over the last 9 months our team in collaboration with the Maharashtra forest department, SAGE foundation and The Grasslands Trust has worked on collecting data on areas that have been affected by elephant activity as well as identifying specific routes in the forest and outside that the elephants have been traversing on. Our team has also interviewed hundreds of community members on the ground and extensively studied interventions implemented in other areas to come up with a list of suitable activities that could be implemented in Gadchiroli and Gondia.
