Two Tamil Nadu Men Sentenced To Three Years In Jail For Electrocuting An Elephant 10 Years Ago

A court in Tamil Nadu has sent two brothers to three years of imprisonment over the death of a wild elephant in 2010.

A Govindarajan and his brother A Kanagaraj were awarded the jail term by the Mettupalayam Judicial Magistrate court on Thursday which also slapped them a fine of Rs 10,000 each.

BCCL

The charges against their father, Ammasai who was also accused in the case, but died during the course of the case, stood abated.

The trio was accused of killing a wild elephant in the Sirumugai range 10 years ago where they used to have a banana plantation.

They had erected an illegal electric fence around the plantation to keep wild animals away, from which the elephant died.

BCCL/ Representational image

Electrocution, especially in the peripheries of forests from low-lying or broken power lines and illegal electric fences one of the biggest killers of wild elephants.

Grim reading

Between 2009 and 2017 a total of 461 elephants have died due to electrocution in the country.

Last year, the Odisha government had told the assembly that the state had lost 119 elephants to electrocution in the past 10 years.

In Assam, the same period has seen close to a hundred elephant death from electrocution while Chhattisgarh has recorded around 50 such deaths.

BCCL

The Sirumugai range in Tamil Nadu has a long history of human-elephant conflicts and in November 2020 a tusker was electrocuted after it came into contact with an electric fence, which was erected illegally, at a private farmland in Puthukadu near Pethikkuttai.

The owner of the banana plantation had set the fence up illegally to prevent wild boars from attacking his crops.