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WILDLIFE: TRACKING
Tracking Death
A railway expansion project increases the threat
to wildlife in Bengal sanctuaries
By Labonita Ghosh
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DEATH ON WHEELS: A tusker killed in a train collision in the Garumara-Chapramari
sanctuary
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For three days the
herd kept watch over the immobile 40-year-old she elephant. It was paralysed
and its hind legs and pelvis fractured. Soon after, wildlife experts put
the lactating elephant on a saline drip but she died on June 10. It is
quite likely her calf will die too. This is almost a replay of the death
in the Garumara-Chapramari sanctuary in north Bengal last year. Despite
being administered painkillers and antibiotics, a 30-year-old pachyderm
had been able to hold out only for nine hours. During the post mortem,
a dead one-month-old calf had been extracted along with a "foreign
metal", possibly a bullet. But it wasn't the gunshot that killed
the elephant; in the thick teak and sal forests of the region where the
eastern Himalayas melt into tea gardens, there's something deadlier than
a bullet. Trains.
Elephants are regularly mowed down by a metre-gauge
train that runs through the wildlife sanctuaries of Mahananda, Garumara-Chapramari,
Jaldapara and Buxa Tiger Reserve. As it happened last Thursday when a
goods train rammed into the mother elephant near Rajabhatkhawa in the
Buxa forests. The century-old 280-km line connects New Jalpaiguri in Bengal
to New Bongaigaon in Assam. In 1999, the Northern Frontier Railway (NFR)
decided to convert it to broad gauge. In November last year, former railway
minister Mamata Banerjee even laid the foundation stone for the Rs 380-crore
project, scheduled to be completed by March 2003.
Wildlife experts, NGOs and forest officials
are vehemently opposing the project. And not without reason. The trains
on the line routinely run over animals that stray onto the tracks. According
to experts, the track runs through an elephant passage or a corridor,
the generations-old trail used by herds to move from one habitat to another.
In Mahananda, Garumara and Jaldapara, the train tracks also pass through
rhinoceros and bison corridors. As a result, these animals often find
themselves face to face with a train. And death.
Since 1992, at least 13 elephants and a rhinoceros
have been run over. "A broader line will mean bigger and faster trains
and more deaths of animals in their own territory," says Lt-Colonel
(retd) Shakti Banerjee of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). "What
will happen when they run a Rajdhani?" he asks.
In September last year, the WWF, with the support
of member NGOs, began a public-interest litigation in the Calcutta High
Court to stop the conversion. It has also forced the Central Government
to take notice. Earlier this month, a four-member Central team led by
Inspector-General of Forests S.S. Bist, director of Project Elephant,
surveyed the area. For two days, the team travelled through the 43-km
stretch that passes through the sanctuaries.
Recently, Bist submitted a report to the Ministry
of Environment which will soon be made public. According to its recommendations,
if conversion of the railroad cannot be avoided then precautions should
be taken. These include a speed limit for the four pairs of passenger
and one pair of goods trains that use the lines, "alterations in
track" to avoid disturbance in the core areas and "putting engineering
structures in place" to minimise risk to animals.
"The track was laid out a century ago when
the concept of protected areas did not exist," says Bist. "But
it cannot continue to encroach on the animals' space." Other forest
officials are more direct. "Just because the Railways committed a
mistake a century ago doesn't mean it can do so again," says a furious
ranger. "They should uproot the track and get out of our area."
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