Panel to look into the death of elephants on rail lines

NGT asks Central Monitoring Committee to handle the issue in coordination with Railways, WII, Tamil Nadu and Kerala

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has tasked a committee constituted by a Union Ministry with looking into the death of wild elephants on the rail tracks that link Tamil Nadu and Kerala through the forest areas of Coimbatore and Palakkad districts. The Central Monitoring Committee, constituted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), is dealing with Project Elephant. The NGT took suo motu cognisance of the death of elephants on the basis of the report, ‘Night, early morning trains cause most elephant deaths,’ published in The Hindu on May 29, 2021. The report said trains that plied between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. had caused the death of seven out of eight elephants on the two lines, A and B, between the Kottekad and Madukkarai stations in the last five years.