MP: After Over A Century, MP Gets Its Resident Wild Elephants

Two groups of elephants, migrated from Chhattisgarh around seven years ago, have settled down in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve (BTR) and Sanjay Dubri Tiger Reserve (SDTR) in Madhya Pradesh after finding them good habitats for them.

A herd of seven wild elephants migrated from Chhattisgarh and arrived in SDTR in 2017, by passing through the elephant corridors in Sidhi, Singrauli and Shahdol in Madhya Pradesh and made the reserve forest their home and became resident elephants.

A year later, a herd of around 40 wild elephants migrated from Chhattisgarh and arrived in the BTR by passing through the elephant corridor in Shahdol and settled down there.

Usually, the elephant herd migrates to other areas when they find the habitat exhausted and unsuitable for their living.

The wild elephants stay back in a forest and become resident elephants when they find it a good habitat for them, a senior forest officer here said.

“Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve is a good habitat for the wild elephants and hence, the reserve forest has been able to retain the migrated wild elephants and made them resident elephants”, the forest officer said.

Bandhavgarh has around 45-50 resident elephant population now, he added.

According to the latest census, Madhya Pradesh has an estimated 97 elephants in the wild.

The latest elephant census estimates a population of 22,446 wild elephants in India.

The last confirmed record of a resident elephant population in Madhya Pradesh was in 1905, in the Amarkantak region of Anuppur district.

The elephant population had later disappeared due to large-scale poaching and deforestation, officials said.

Elephants began to return to MP in a migratory pattern from neighbouring Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand in the late 1980s and 1990s.

But they were not considered a resident population till recently.