December 31, 2020
Raj Kishore Chauhan, a resident of Kari Kot village in Bahraich district of Uttar Pradesh, lost his mother in a leopard attack two years back. “My mother aged 55 went out of the house to attend the call of nature early in the morning when a leopard dragged her away. It was most unfortunate,” he said.
The northern portion of Bahraich district bordering Nepal is part of the Terai, a landscape which witnesses a high degree of human-wildlife conflict with 26 cases per year. The maximum number of human deaths and injuries are due to tigers and leopards, the two big cats dominating the region. So, for people like Chauhan, it is living on the edge. They have to take all necessary precautions to protect themselves against sudden attacks
Elephant Deaths Highlight Struggle Between Wildlife Conservation And Development In Uttarakhand moneycontrol.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from moneycontrol.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Also affected are the local tribal communities, who depend on these resorts for livelihood.
So how did the Masinagudi area get embroiled in a protracted court case, and what is the elephant in the room the locals claim the “foreign NGOs” have missed?
The court battle
The October Supreme Court judgment came on 32 appeals filed by resorts and private land owners, including actor Mithun Chakraborty, under the banner of Hospitality Association of Mudumalai, against a Madras High Court verdict of 2011. The High Court had upheld a Tamil Nadu government order notifying the elephant corridor in the area that included Masinagudi.
5 leopard cubs rescued in Bongaigaon
5 leopard cubs were rescued from a forest at Borigaon village in Abhayapuri, Bongaigaon. Earlier in 2018 also a leopard cub was rescued from Bongaigaon
Abhayapuri: Five leopard cubs were rescued from Abhayapuri in Bongaigaon, Assam on Tuesday.
The leopard cubs were rescued from the forest at Borigaon village in Abhaayapuri when a woman noticed the cubs with their mother.
The mother of the cubs left them and runs away from the place after the woman noticed them.
Later the locals informed the Forest Department officials and a team of Forest Department led by Jayanta Das reached the spot. After testing they found that the cubs are around 15 days old and as at this time they need to be with their mother the forest officials left them in the same place from where they were rescued and told the villagers that they would not cause any harm to the people.
Assam electric fences take toll, pregnant elephant latest casualty
Data shared by the Assam Forest Department show that the state saw 113 elephant deaths due to electrocution between 2009 and September 25, 2020, with several more casualties reported since. Updated: December 18, 2020 8:32:46 am
Assam Environment and Forest Minister Parimal Suklabaidya said electrocution was a “dangerous villain”, but there was no easy solution.
ELECTRIC fences put up by villagers to protect their crops and homes from wandering pachyderms claimed three more elephants in Assam’s Chirang district this month, with the last one on Wednesday. Officials said the one killed on Wednesday was pregnant.
This takes the number of elephants killed in similar incidents since August in the vicinity of the Manas National Park, amid a growing human-elephant conflict, to six. “At least five elephants have been electrocuted in Chirang alone since August. Villagers steal p