In India, wild elephants charge all the way into villages. In 2024, the country recorded 623 people killed by these animals.
India is home to 60% of Asia's wild elephants, more than 22,000 animals. Each year, they cause hundreds of deaths and injuries.
According to Indian authorities, the country's elephants have lost more than 96% of the territories they once occupied. The decline in their population is accelerating: the number of pachyderms has fallen by 18% in ten years.
They then leave their forests, cross rivers and roads, and enter villages. They most often end up in wheat or maize fields or tea plantations.
The animals often come to feed while the villages are asleep. Frightened by human presence, or seeking to protect their young, elephants regularly charge at residents.
Out of revenge, fear, or to protect crops, villagers kill elephants every year, most often by poisoning them or trapping them with illegal electrified fences.
In recent years, hundreds of animals have thus been deliberately killed. Residents face herds that invite themselves into plantations as well as villages and terrorize the countryside.
In the tea plantations, the thousands of laborers who pick the leaves now work with the constant risk of seeing wild elephants arrive.
To limit confrontations, an NGO has deployed every night, for two and a half years, 600 volunteers divided into about sixty groups tasked with watching the plantations.
Ganesh Roy, a laborer, has seen his parents' maize and potato fields regularly ravaged by elephants. In the area covered by these patrols, no villager and no elephant have been killed since they were created two and a half years ago.
One night, the presence of an elephant is reported. On site, a large male appears in the beams of light: he has left the forest to reach the rice paddies.
With their torches and their shouts, the patrol, joined by two forest rangers, intimidates the animal so that it leaves the rice paddy.