A house damaged by Arikomban in 301 Colony.
This story is the first of a two-part series on Arikomban, a male elephant that authorities relocated from his home near Munnar to Periyar Tiger Reserve in Kerala, and then later to Tamil Nadu’s Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve this year.
Kochi: Thirty-eight-year-old Viji Suresh and her family of four live in a crude, barely 300-square-foot concrete hut in 301 Colony, a kilometer or so from Anayirangal Dam in Kerala’s Idukki district.
The walls of Suresh’s house are not cemented. The roof has a dangerous slant. The nearest shops are an eight km walk away. She has to brave the walk through prime elephant territory, for the area used to once be a grassland that the giants foraged in. Suresh’s family is one of the 300-odd tribal families who were given land – an acre and a house – in the area as part of a rehabilitation scheme in the early 2000s. Elephant herds still use the area as they move between the dam – a perennial source of water across seasons – and other foraging sites in the vicinity.
And yet, until two months ago, she had only a single worry: a solitary male tusker that used to come to their house looking for his favorite meal, rice. He had a name: Arikomban, or the rice-tusker (ari – rice, komban – tusker). The elephant, unlike others, would not hesitate to break down walls to get to the food, Suresh said. His search for rice ranged across not only 301 Colony but also ration shops which stored rice, and homes (specifically, kitchens) in villages and settlements including Singukandam. He would move through the surrounding agricultural areas – including cardamom plantations – and roads that connect with forest patches in and around Chinnakanal, a small town around 22 km by road from the hill station of Munnar.
“We are very relieved now,” said a smiling Suresh.
That’s because on April 29, the state’s forest department – on the urgent requests of several local residents including Suresh – swung into action. They successfully captured Arikomban and relocated him to Periyar Tiger Reserve, around 80 km from his home in Chinnakanal. In a tragic turn of events, the Tamil Nadu Forest Department had to tranquilise the elephant once again on June 5 when it entered the town of Cumbum in Theni district. The team then relocated it to the forests of Kalakkad Mundanthurai in Kanyakumari district, where it now dwells.
But people’s emotions revolving around Arikomban centre not just on relief. There’s indignation, grief, even simmering anger – that an elephant that roamed their land has now been displaced to a foreign, unknown area. And most poignantly, empathy. Contrary to perception, it is not just animal lovers, social media users and urban, city dwellers who mirror these sentiments. Several residents that The Wire spoke to empathised with Arikomban, asking how fair it was to insist that the elephant be moved out when it was actually people who had taken over its lands. And as recently as June 6, local indigenous communities staged a sit-in protest on the Bodimettu-Chinnakanal road to express their angst at the elephand being moved to an unfamiliar territory and put through trauma; and that too, twice. Their request: bring Arikomban back home.
Meanwhile, as emotions run high, there are other crucial questions that the story of Arikomban raises. What created Arikomban, the unusual rice-eating elephant who was ready to take on the very high risks of stepping into human-use areas to get his favourite food? Individual elephant histories matter, scientists studying elephant behaviour told The Wire. And while it’s easy to put all the blame on an Arikomban, there are numerous other factors that play a role in increased human-elephant interactions in the area, others said. These include changes in land use (such as people being settled in elephant habitats and corridors, and encroachments by illegal camping and tenting facilities), linear intrusions (such as existing roads being widened and residents fencing off their lands) and improper waste disposal – all of which can alter elephant behaviour and movement patterns, as the animals desperately try to adapt and navigate a changing world.
Changing landscapes, altered paths
So what was Arikomban’s world like?
Arikomban’s original home lies in Chinnakanal and its surroundings, in the north-eastern mountain tracts of Idukki district in the Western Ghats. The area is a melange of land-use types. The higher elevations – enroute to Munnar town, around 20 km away – are home to tea estates, interspersed with small forest patches. Lower down – and adjacent to Anayirangal Dam (built on the Panniyar river, a tributary of the Periyar) – people cultivate cardamom under large forest trees in both small and large land holdings. Locals also grow spices and other crops here. The region, including revenue land, villages and small towns such as Poopara and Rajakumari, connects to the dense evergreen forests of the Mathikettan Shola National Park on its east. The Park marks the border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
In 1965, Kerala completed the Anayirangal Dam submerging parts of Poopara, Chinnakanal and Rajakumari. Tell-tale attempts at afforesting the remaining grasslands around Anayirangal Dam still exist: stands of eucalyptus and acacia still dot the area (see photo). Later, in 2001-2002, the then Congress-led government rehabilitated around 300 landless tribal families hailing from other parts of Idukki district into these grassland patches. It allocated an acre of land for each family and built them small concrete houses. The grasslands got a new name: 301 Colony. Viji Suresh, who now lives in the Colony, is one of the beneficiaries of this project and grows cardamom on her land. As is Palanisamy V., who now cultivates butter beans and other vegetables on his precious one acre.
The rehabilitation, however, occurred despite a forest official’s report recommending against it. Prakriti Srivastava, the then Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) of Munnar, underscored in her report that the area was used by elephants, and was in fact an elephant corridor, reported The South First. Recently, while hearing a case regarding Arikomban, the Kerala high court called the rehabilitation “imprudent”.
This rehabilitation of landless people in an elephant corridor has been the root of all problems, said environmentalist M.N. Jayachandran, who is also a member of the Kerala State Animal Welfare Board.
Even residents seem to concur. Jose Chandy, a local who manages a small cardamom patch in 301 Colony for his friend who was allotted an acre in the area, says that the influx of people into the Colony and their clearing of grasslands for cultivation caused elephants to move out from the grassland and into agricultural and human-use areas nearby.
Encroachments are also prevalent in the area, said Munnar DFO Ramesh Bishnoi. Several camps and tenting facilities operating in territorial forest divisions are doing so without permissions. The Forest Department has said this in its report submitted to the Task Force appointed by the Kerala high court to look into the matter, he said.
“The Panchayat and DTPC [District Tourism Promotion Council] officials are permitting resort owners to construct temporary sheds and tents in the wild forest area to promote tourism,” he said, reading from the report. “It shall be banned to avoid any disturbances to wild elephants. Apart from that the panchayat should take steps to demolish the temporary sheds and tents in accordance with law.”
Based on a report by the police, the Chinnakanal panchayat issued notices on June 13 to more than 20 camps and tenting facilities in the Santhanpara and Suryanelli areas to cease operations as they were operating illegally and without permits.
High levels of man-elephant conflict is only a recent phenomenon and did not exist when he migrated into the area 30 years ago to run a tea shop, said Joy A.D., whose tea shop is now a small hotel in Poopara, a town near Chinnakanal.
“I’ve been seeing the changes for three decades now,” he told The Wire. “Trees have been cut for resorts and homestays. The forest is no longer a forest. Where will the animals go?”
As footfall increases, civic authorities also have to cope with increased waste. And they’re struggling. On June 5, the Forest Department issued a notice to the Chinnakanal panchayat to clear a waste dump near 301 Colony after a video of an elephant and her calf feeding on the waste surfaced on social media. On June 8, the Kerala high court directed the state government to take steps to clear the waste. Per The Hindu, the Chinnakanal panchayat president claimed that they had no other option to dispose of the waste.
Go to the garbage dump in the estate of Kallar near Munnar town, and you’re sure to run into Padayappa, a big solitary male elephant. Residents in the locality reported that he would also consume plastic waste in his attempts to devour vegetable and other organic waste. In late May, the Munnar panchayat cleared the dump yard and covered it with soil. Workers told The Wire during a visit to the site on May 26 that authorities had driven the elephant away.
Linear barriers to movement
To cope with the influx of more tourists, many of Munnar’s narrow roads are now wider. For example, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) widened stretches of the Munnar (Lockhart) Gap Road which is part of the Kochi-Dhanushkodi national highway in Devikulam.
This widening, however, has meant that elephant herds no longer come to the small stream near the DFO’s office located on the highway in Devikulam to drink water, Bishnoi told The Wire.
“The wider roads and traffic make it difficult for them to cross the road,” he said.
A study by a team of researchers led by Raman Sukumar, who has been studying elephants in India for more than three decades, found that more elephant individuals displayed “excitable” behaviour on wider roads in Mudumalai National Park, Tamil Nadu.
Another barrier that elephants have to be mindful of as they move around is fencing. Farmers now install electric fences in an attempt to protect their crops, including cardamom (photo). Large tracts, and sometimes crucial points and routes that elephants are familiar with, are often fenced off this way. Elephants, therefore, have to find a way around the barricade – forcing them to explore the land, and once again bringing them close to people.
Hadlee Renjith, a nature photographer who also runs frog and bird watching tours in the landscape, noted how fences appear to be forcing elephants to move along human trails, paths and roads more often than now. Barbed wire fencing as well as thorny fencing plants such as the Indian coral tree and bougainvillaea prevent their movement, he added, and this inconveniences both people and elephants.
Though promoted as a mitigation measure against elephants, fences can also create conflict, said Divya Vasudev, co-founder of Conservation Initiatives, who studies elephants and elephant movement across large landscapes in India.
All these factors fragment elephant habitats. The lands they can now safely use and graze or rest in are dispersed in small portions in the landscape, and the huge animals have no other option but to navigate around or through them. And though land consolidation and land use planning are the most recommended actions, these are never worked upon, Vasudev said. Instead, barrier methods, such as fencing, are used more.
In places like India, elephant habitat is highly fragmented, she said.
“With increasing fragmentation, there’s going to be a larger interface between people and elephants so that is going to potentially cause conflict,” said Vasudev.
Additionally, when elephants disperse outside protected areas then they tend to cross paths with people more, and conflict could be the result again. With more fragmentation comes more need for dispersal too, she added.
In Arikomban’s case, habitat fragmentation appears to be an issue, she noted.
Elephants’ histories matter
So the landscape – as elephants, and Arikomban, perceived it – has changed.
But why did Arikomban, specifically, behave the way he did, taking more risks as he searched for his favourite meal? His penchant for rice took him to dangerous, human-use areas. How did he develop a taste for rice? Tracking individual elephant histories could be crucial in addressing and developing solutions for conflict, said scientist Nishant Srinivasaiah, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science and has been studying elephant behaviour in south India – and specifically that of male elephants – for more than a decade now.
But delving into Arikomban’s history is difficult. Rumours abound.
One talks of a young Arikomban watching his mother suffer at the hands of people decades ago. A local resident also toldThe Wire about an incident where a burning tyre had been thrown on an elephant and her calf during that time. Estate watcher Sivan M. told TNIE that locals first encountered a one-year-old Arikomban and his sick mother in 1987, in the Lower Division of the Muttukadu cardamom estate of Vaikundam Plantations near Chinnakanal. Local tribes and the forest department treated the female elephant’s injured leg but she died in three months, leaving Arikomban to grow up alone in the tea-cardamom-village landscape. According to Sivan, Arikomban then went by a different name: Kalla-komban, or the tusker that steals.
“Such events can have a major impact on the elephant and its decision making,” Srinivasaiah told The Wire.
“Did tourists or other people try to feed him? Did they throw him bags of rice? What could have triggered him to pick up the habit and go looking for it?”
The history of the elephant matters a lot, Srinivasaiah explained.
Elephants have three ideas of space. One, he said, is organic space – what the elephant can see, hear and touch at that point in time. For instance, Arikomban can smell rice and enter human-use areas, or smell forest fruits and go back into the forest. Another is imagined space. If a herd has been ranging in an area and witnessed tremendous change, there is a memory of it: memories of resources, of water, even threats, so that they learn to avoid certain areas actively as well. There are memories of physical barriers, garbage dumps, even people’s use of the area. Elephants adapt accordingly, and the information is passed on to younger members as well.
And finally, there is the elephant’s lived space: the landscape as it is today. This, really, is the conflict, said Srinivasaiah.
“Conflict is not about feeding on crops, going on roads, or into towns and cities. It’s the lived conflict of the memory of what the lived space was and what it is today. There’s a memory which tells him that he could go somewhere, but there’s an organic space that says you could feed on this.”
Once they know about a food source, they learn fast, Srinivasaiah said.
“And if they don’t find it, they will find ways of doing so,” he said. “This could have led them to kitchens or ration shops. Because the organic space is telling the elephant that what he likes is there, just the means of getting it has changed.”
But who’s the real culprit?
“It’s very easy to say that Arikomban is the issue,” independent elephant biologist Sreedhar Vijayakrishnan told The Wire. “However, there are several other factors such as land use changes, the attitudes of locals (and changes in these), and even the way the media frames and presents the issue that play an important role in this.”
And the media attention that Arikomban got has been unparalleled. Television news coverage has been dramatic, with media teams following Arikomban’s every move during the days just before and after his capture and relocation. Even otherwise, with increased phone and social media access, reports of negative man-elephant interactions make it to the news immediately. Elephants are often portrayed as deliberate killers, with sensationalised word and phrase choices. The elephant that “ravaged several human settlements”, “wreaked havoc”, “rogue tusker on rampage”: these are some of the ways that print media portrayed Arikomban. Once Arikomban was out of the landscape, however, media coverage petered out, noted Vijayakrishnan.
“The media is only bothered about the drama,” he said. Locals do revere elephants in the landscape but that angle is never portrayed, he added.
Locals, meanwhile, are divided on whether Arikomban really was a “problem animal” at all. Like Viji Suresh, Palanisamy, another resident of 301 tribal colony, said that being a tribal he knew how to handle elephants and use the same areas that the giants do without getting in each other’s way.
“But it was different with Arikomban: he was more aggressive than other tuskers,” Palanisamy said.
Arikomban was an issue and everyday he would get complaints of the elephant having damaged houses or ration shops in his search for rice, said DFO Bishnoi. “It was a localised issue, and topography also ensured that Arikomban would frequent only some areas,” he said.
Others say that Arikomban was framed; maybe even unwittingly. Human deaths and damages fell squarely on Arikomban even if he may not have caused it, some residents said.
As per official estimates by the Forest Department as quoted by one report, Arikomban killed seven people and destroyed 30 buildings in three months alone. But some locals, such as Nambi T., a driver with the Forest Department at Eravikulam National Park, find it hard to believe that only Arikomban is to blame. Not everyone can identify individual elephants, especially so if their characteristic features – such as tusk length or size – are similar. Both Arikomban and Chakkakomban (or the Jackfruit Tusker, named after his penchant for jackfruits) are of similar build and sport similar-looking tusks. Both elephants, residents say, have charged at people, and caused human deaths. One resident in fact said that Chakkakomban was “the more dangerous one”. Additionally, identifying individual elephants when they raid shops and homes at night is fairly difficult.
Many residents have also not held back in putting themselves in Arikomban’s shoes. Many empathised with Arikomban.
“How is it fair to insist that the elephant be moved out when it is actually us who have taken over their lands?” asked Karnan M., a 28-year-old auto driver in Munnar town.
And now, some tribal communities in the Chinnakanal area who shared space with Arikomban want him back. On June 6, Muthuvan tribes from three settlements in the Chinnakanal area conducted a sit-in protest on the Bodimettu-Chinnakanal road to bring Arikomban back to their – and his – home. Meanwhile, on June 16, the Madras high court squashed a petition by a Kochi resident requesting that Arikomban be brought back to his home in Kerala. The court cannot decide where Arikomban should be released, that is the Forest Department’s call, it said.
So, for now Arikomban will remain where he is: almost 300 km south of his home of Chinnakanal in Kerala, in the forests of Tamil Nadu’s Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve. Arikomban may never see his home again.
Arikomban’s story has also put the limelight on using relocation to tackle such “problem animals”. It is a tool that appears to be increasingly in use, but is it the ideal solution? And does it really solve the problem of human-elephant conflict? Read Part 2 of the series to find out.
All photos by Aathira Perinchery.