IWN Report — Monday, 17 August 2026

Five Indian states now have their own paper trail of where elephants and people collide most often, and why.

The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and the Project Elephant Division of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change have spent the past year building state-wide human-elephant conflict reports for Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and West Bengal, and released all five together on World Elephant Day, marked this year on 12 and 13 August at a ceremony in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh.

Five Reports

Odisha’s report is the largest of the group, running 128 pages and covering data back to 2000 — the same starting point used by Karnataka and West Bengal, whose reports come in at 92 and 96 pages respectively. Tamil Nadu begins its series in 2010, while Kerala’s, the newest of the five, starts in 2008.

Bilal Habib is the lead author on all five reports, joined by a rotating group of co‑authors including Anukul Nath, Mukesh Chand, Anshuman Gogoi, Parag Nigam and Ramesh Kumar Pandey. No matter which state you look at, the focus stays consistent: how elephants are dying, how people are being injured, where conflicts cluster geographically, and which months see the worst of it.

Shared Pressures

None of the five states show conflict spread out evenly, WII notes. It bunches up in particular landscapes, and the reasons keep recurring across state lines: habitat carved up by roads and railway tracks, electric fencing and power infrastructure creeping closer to elephant range, villages pushing further into what used to be forest edge.

Pinning that down this precisely is the point, according to WII. Know exactly where the hotspots are, and you know where to put the early-warning systems, the safer infrastructure and the coordinated response between forest departments and the people living alongside the herds.

Southern Plan

WII and the Project Elephant Division didn’t stop at the five state reports. They also published a 100-page Regional Action Plan for Comprehensive Understanding & Management of Human-Elephant Conflict in South India, folding the southern states’ findings into one shared framework rather than leaving each to sit alone.

Elephant Day

Union Minister of State for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Kirti Vardhan Singh and Andhra Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan released the reports together at the national World Elephant Day event in Visakhapatnam. WII marked the occasion with one more publication too: a photographic volume called 30 Giant Steps of Project Elephant, put together by Ramesh Kumar Pandey, the environment ministry’s Additional Director General for Wildlife, and writer Ananda Banerjee.

Sources: Wildlife Institute of India — Human Elephant Conflict Reports · Wildlife Institute of India — Regional Action Plan for South India · Wildlife Institute of India — 30 Giant Steps of Project Elephant