{"id":22815,"date":"2026-02-28T02:23:58","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T02:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/?p=22815"},"modified":"2026-02-28T02:23:58","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T02:23:58","slug":"as-forests-shrink-and-herds-grow-central-indias-jumbo-crisis-is-primed-to-spiral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2026\/02\/28\/as-forests-shrink-and-herds-grow-central-indias-jumbo-crisis-is-primed-to-spiral\/","title":{"rendered":"As Forests Shrink and Herds Grow, Central India\u2019s Jumbo Crisis Is Primed to Spiral"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>INDIA, February 24, 2026 (Indian Express): Fewer than 8% of India\u2019s 22,446 elephants \u2013 spread across six states \u2013 are responsible for nearly half of all human-elephant conflict casualties nationwide. Most belong to nomadic herds displaced from shrinking forest habitats and forced into croplands. In fact, four of the new elephant areas, located across central India \u2013 south Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra \u2013 had negligible elephant presence till herds from the other two states, Jharkhand (then south Bihar) and Odisha, started moving in around the mid-1980s. What forced these now stateless elephants out were a combination of natural and manmade triggers: serial droughts, rapid expansion of mining, and construction of reservoirs in south Bihar and Odisha. The outcome is that hundreds of elephants now depend solely or primarily on raiding agricultural fields, where they must compete with desperate farmers.<br><br>Last year, the government\u2019s elephant population report recorded that the central Indian landscape is fragmented due to \u201cunmitigated mining and linear infrastructure construction\u201d etc, which has pushed elephants to new areas, \u201cresulting in escalating conflicts with humans\u201d. This deadly phase of human-elephant conflict, experts warn, is likely to intensify. Even as high-nutrient crops are boosting breeding in the crop-dependent herds, leading to a surge in numbers, the elephant population in the forests exceeds what these heavily degraded habitats can sustain. \u201cMost herds of habituated crop-raiders have multiple calves. These new generations will have no memory of natural foraging. Nobody knows if they will stop visiting croplands if they come across good forest habitats tomorrow,\u201d says ecologist Raman Sukumar of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), who has worked extensively on Asian elephants.<br><br>Much more at source.<br><a href=\"https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/india\/india-elephant-forests-herd-10550119\/\n\">https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/india\/india-elephant-forests-herd-10550119\/<br><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>INDIA, February 24, 2026 (Indian Express): Fewer than 8% of India\u2019s 22,446 elephants \u2013 spread across six states \u2013 are,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22830,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22815"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22831,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22815\/revisions\/22831"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}