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India’s top court has ordered tough new steps to protect wild elephant herds as habitat loss and human-elephant conflict intensify, a move welcomed by campaigners on Friday.
The world’s most populous nation is also home to the majority of Asian elephants, a species listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and whose habitat is increasingly being sliced up by highways and railways or clawed up by mines.
The Supreme Court has directed states to prevent the blockage of elephant corridors — routes used by herds to move between rapidly shrinking habitats — and ordered a survey to identify obstructions along those routes.
That must include steps to end the use of any “coercive measure to divert the natural movement of the elephants”, it read.
