: Meet The School Teacher Making Way For 500 Elephants to Cross 25 Tea Gardens #IndiaNEWS #Animal Welfare The Pascal Munda incident near the Numaligarh’s Morongi tea estate in Upper Assam stirred

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Meet The School Teacher Making Way For 500 Elephants to Cross 25 Tea Gardens #IndiaNEWS #Animal Welfare
The Pascal Munda incident near the Numaligarh’s Morongi tea estate in Upper Assam stirred some much-needed discourse on Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) in July this year. A group of villagers teased a herd of elephants on NH 39 and when one of them retaliated, it led to the death of Munda, a local. The entire ordeal was captured on camera and soon went viral.  
Whose fault was it? The elephants who were quietly passing through a human colony located between tea estates, or the humans who felt encroached upon by the herd? It was a case of absence of altruistic behaviour.  
Last year, an HEC incident occurred in north Bengal’s Titi – Buxa corridor. An intoxicated 19-year-old was attacked by a mother elephant after the teen hurled stones at her baby. During the attack, he fell into a nullah, but was miraculously saved. A few kilometres away, a 50-year-old had died in 2018 after he chased an elephant for a selfie.  
An obsession with entertainment and making instant viral videos at the expense of the majestic creature is slowly becoming a pattern in several parts of India, from Karnataka to West Bengal.  
If problems like electrocution, deforestation, illegal encroachments and fencing weren’t enough, the added burden of social media is further pitting the elephants and humans against one other.  
Photo credit: Arindam Ghatak
To break the emerging but dangerous pattern, S P Pandey, a primary school teacher from Malbazar in Jalpaiguri district, has been conducting sensitisation workshops for the last two years across five elephant corridors — Apalchand-Mahananda, Gorumara-Apalchand, Apalchand-Kalimpong (via Sylee TG), Apalchand-Kalimpong (via Meenglass TG) and Chapramari-Kalimpong.
The 43-year-old has seen some success, thanks to his efforts to safeguard the rights of wild animals and mitigate conflicts since 2013. For this, he was recently recognised as a Green Corridor Champion by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI). He is now working in collaboration with the WTI to further champion the cause.  
“Our association with S P Pandey and his team at SPOAR (Society for Protecting Ophiofauna and Animal Rights) dates back to 2018. He has been a dedicated force in the North Bengal region, with the right kind of passion and commitment to save wildlife and wild spaces for many years, and we are proud to have partnered with him to take forward conservation initiatives in the region. With the West Bengal Forest Department, we have been able to establish a monitoring mechanism across nine elephant corridors in the Duars region with some key local level actions mobilised for elephants and their safe passage,� says Upasana Ganguly, manager and head, Right of Passage of Elephant Corridors Projects, WTI.

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