In India’s race for development, elephants are losing out as their habitat fragments

BENGALURU – A spate of deadly accidents involving trains and elephants in India has highlighted the growing incursions of roads and railways into elephant corridors and forests across the country.

Locals and wildlife experts are urging that the known tracks be declared and protected by the government as animal crossing areas. Failure to do so risks more elephant deaths and more of the animals encroaching into farms and settlements.

The concerns come after a high-speed

passenger train struck a wild elephant herd

of 50 in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam on Dec 20, killing seven of the animals, including four calves and a pregnant female.

This was the fourth such tragedy in India in 2025. Data from the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change shows that, including the latest deaths, at least 94 elephants have been killed in collisions since 2019.

“Most urgently, we must improve the coordination between the forest and railway departments to prevent accidents,” said Mr Sagnik Sen, founder of Sage Foundation which tracks elephant migration. 

Facing criticism after the incident, Northeast Frontier Railways issued a statement saying that it had saved 160 elephants from train-related accidents using speed curbs, vegetation clearance, clear signage and an artificial intelligence-based system to detect and alert drivers and stations about “intrusions” in real time.

But with the growing points of collision, the existing systems are clearly falling short, said Mr Sen.

India is among just 17 mega-diverse countries in the world hosting most of the world’s species, but without functional corridors, wild populations that become isolated by highways, train lines and other large infrastructure projects could die out.

There are 150 official elephant corridors, according to a 2023 government report. They do not get formal protection but the forest department has to monitor encroachment and railways to impose speed limits there. Being declared a corridor is a sort of orange warning light suggesting caution, not a strict red light that would bar construction of highways or railway lines.

There are also concerns that the number of corridors might be undercounted. For example, there are 27 officially declared tiger corridors, but 192 are recorded across 30 tiger reserves.

The 150 known elephant corridors do not include new routes like the one in Assam where the collision occurred, said Mr Sen.

Wildlife corridors are vital land strips of vegetation connecting fragmented habitats, allowing safe movement for animals, especially those that typically inhabit large territories, such as elephants and tigers. Designated pathways are critical for biodiversity and reducing human-animal conflict. 

When passing through these areas, vehicles and trains are required to slow down and watch out for animals. Hitting elephants in corridors might attract penalties or disciplinary action, but experts said they are not strict enough to act as deterrents.

India has the world’s largest population of wild Asian elephants at 22,446 as at October 2025, and they live in diverse habitats across four regions – southern, north-eastern, east-central and northern. 

The 2023 report on elephant corridors by India’s Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change said that given the species’ relatively large home ranges spanning 100 sq km to 3,000 sq km, the integrity of their habitats rests on maintaining contiguity between habitat patches.

Blocked corridors

The report identified 150 elephant corridors, up from 88 in 2010, when the last count was made. Some of these are historical routes over 100 years old, while others may be quite new, created by sub-herds of elephants looking for food and water. 

Studies show that despite official efforts to restore corridors, many are regularly blocked or thinned out by encroachment, roads and railway tracks. This has forced elephant herds to circumvent blockades, crossing into newer areas outside designated corridors where trains might travel at high speeds and forests are reduced to narrow strips along railway lines. 

The herd in Assam, for instance, was crossing a stretch that is not officially designated as a corridor but has been known in recent years for elephant movement. In the preliminary probe, forest department officials claimed they warned the stationmaster about the crossing herd, but railway officials said they did not get the message in time to instruct the train driver to slow down. 

A 2024 government survey estimated 186 elephants were killed in train collisions between 2009 and 2024, and for the first time identified 77 railway stretches across 14 states needing urgent intervention. The government proposed installing 705 structures to reduce wildlife mortality, especially for elephants, such as ramps, crossings, underpasses, overpasses, bridge extensions, fences and barricades.

Mr Sen said these structures might work to an extent, but they could end up diverting herds to newer routes, simply displacing the problem. “As elephants are forced to move, we have to map the latest corridors, some as recent as a year old. Their movement is changing, and new routes must be monitored and checked for potential conflicts continuously. Proper warning systems must be institutionalised to prevent deaths – of humans and wildlife,” he told The Straits Times.

Changing patterns of movement

Of the 150 official corridors, wildlife experts said some are already abandoned because of obstructions. 

For instance, the traditional Kankrajhore corridor in South Bengal was disrupted by agricultural expansion into the region, and after the West Bengal state government used fire torches in 2016 to deter elephants from entering villages.

A local forest department official told ST on condition of anonymity that elephants had nearly abandoned the route, but villagers are warned about “the herd’s possible return to this historical corridor in future”.

On the other hand, new routes consequently formed are not being officially notified or protected.

As forest habitats are not contiguous, elephant herds are splintering more frequently, some as they become isolated on either side of a canal or highway, and others when they go in search of fresh pasture and clean water. A case in point: The Wildlife Trust of India’s Rite of Passage report in 2017 identified 101 corridors, versus the government’s count of 150 by 2023. 

“The 48 per cent increase in the number of elephant corridors within a six-year period is caused primarily by fragmentation of habitats and shrinking of forests. Elephants that belonged to five distinct zones in the country have begun to move greater distances, and into areas they were not in historically,” said Mr Avinash Krishnan, director of A Rocha India which researches wildlife conservation. 

A study by A Rocha India noted that elephants from the Bannerghatta-Hosur area in south India, ranging from the Bannerghatta National Park in Karnataka to the North Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu, were now found moving in two new corridors in Andhra Pradesh, which was never home to pachyderms.

This is because the three classical corridors in the historical region, which used to facilitate 80 to 200 elephants through the year, along with tigers, leopards and sloth bears, face degradation and many blockades from human use, the study said. 

Unlike the linear 1km- to 2.5km-long traditional corridors of the past, the new corridors in Andhra Pradesh are each 100km and 70km long, do not have vegetation similar to the home forest, and include vast tracts of farmland and village areas where elephants tend to graze, leading to conflict with villagers.

Fragmented, broken forests and blocking infrastructure are forcing elephants to walk greater distances, increasingly outside their home regions. Some infrastructure developments have repeatedly displaced herds.

Using thermal-imaging drones, Mr Sen’s team has tracked a herd of 50 elephants from Odisha that split up from the parent herd of 200 in 2014 when the government built an irrigation canal that sliced the corridor there in two. The herd settled in Chhattisgarh for some years, but intense quarrying there forced them some of them to go east to Bengal and others to move west to Gadchiroli in the western state of Maharashtra, where there were no elephants before. 

Many such routes are not declared, protected, or tracked officially, said Mr Sen, and government officials become aware of them only when villagers report sightings or complain of elephant raids. 

Wildlife experts say that unless these critical corridors – new and old – are formally declared and restored, habitat fragmentation will worsen and movement will become more dangerous for elephants.

“The solution is to zonate land and prioritise safeguarding elephant habitats. This includes declaring corridors and protecting all of them,” said Mr Krishnan.