India’s National Heritage Animal needs your help. You may have read in the news that there has been a spate of elephant deaths due to collisions with speeding trains recently. In fact, eight elephants have died in this manner in just the last month, all in the north-eastern state of Assam.

Three elephants, including two pregnant females (who later delivered two stillborn calves), were killed at Hojai in the Nagaon district of central Assam on December 5. A day later, another train killed a nine-year-old male elephant and injured an adult female at Banglapara in the Goalpara district. (The injured female succumbed to her injuries few days later.) Most recently, on December 17, three wild elephants including a calf were killed after they were hit by a train in the Nagaon district.

Train collisions are the fourth-largest cause of unnatural elephant mortality in the country, with over 220 elephant mortalities across different states of India since 1987. Further, such collisions can also cause trains to derail, potentially endangering human lives.

We at the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) are committed to addressing this grave problem. And we have had considerable prior success in this area. Working with the Railways and the local Forest Department in Rajaji National Park over a 12-year period, we were able to drastically reduce train-hits within the national park, after 20 elephants had previously died due to train-hits from 1987-2001.

We intend to put this experience to use in Assam through direct, short-term interventions in three critical railway stretches in Goalpara, Hojai and Deepor Beel. Activities will include organising local communities into volunteer networks to keep tabs on elephant herds (WTI will incentivise such networks by providing support for basic infrastructure like solar lamps, school benches etc), deploying night patrols on railway lines to drive elephants away from the tracks, providing timely intimation to station masters, and organising sensitisation camps for locomotive pilots.

We know what needs to be done, but we need your help to do it. Help us mitigate elephant deaths due to train hits in Assam.

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