Fresh elephant count in India to begin in July; Census report to come next year

New Delhi: The Centre has planned to start a massive exercise of counting country’s elephants next month. The entire process is expected to take six-seven months and final census report will be released in March-April next year.

The environment ministry has called a meeting of stakeholders on July 15 before beginning the exercise. The ministry will also ask the forest officials to identify human-elephant conflict prone zones during the countrywide counting process.


The all India enumeration of wild population of elephants is carried out at every five year interval. The last elephant census report was released in 2012 when their numbers were estimated to be around 29,391-30,711 (60% of the total Asian elephant population) as compared to 27,657-27,682 in 2007.

The forest official will this time use direct counting method, as far as possible, at many locations to ascertain exact numbers of elephants. It would be different from the indirect method, like dung count, used during earlier census.

“Since human-elephant conflict, that on an average results in the death of 100 elephants and 400 humans every year, has emerged as a major concern in many parts of the country, the ministry during the stakeholders’ (state authorities and experts) meeting will sensitise the forest official about this issue and ask them to identify such zones for taking precautionary measures,” said an official.

The ministry had in 1992 launched Project Elephant as a centrally sponsored scheme with objectives to protect elephants, their habitat & corridors, address issues of man-animal conflict and take measures for welfare of captive elephants.

The Project is being mainly implemented in 16 states/Union Territories — Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

Various states have so far notified 28 Elephant Reserves (ERs), extending over about 61830.08 sq km, for implementing the Project Elephant schemes.