A tale of two conflicts

People, we were told, were not keen to participate in more meetings with NGOs as promises, by most NGOs, had not been kept. We had gone to discuss conservation education, seek inputs prior to freezing the plan, and ended up listening to the story of human – elephant conflict in the neighbouring villages. Story of the situation having gone from bad to worse.

Village A had planned a meeting to discuss human - elephant conflict. Besides the villagers the meeting was to include members of two local organizations.  A local politician got a whiff of the meeting and came over. During the meeting he actively participated in the discussions and promised to help. Elections were around the corner and as a corollary he was pro-active in not only taking the discussions further towards actions but also sanctioned funds. His only condition was that the fence, which had been decided during the meeting, should come up prior to the elections.

Image: Karpagam Chelliah

The electric fence, to keep elephants away, did come up in a hurry (to meet the time-line) and as a consequence without a well thought out plan. The fence was put up till a river. Beyond the river lay Village B. The fence stood strong and effective for a while. During this time it succeeded in pushing the conflict to Village B. A location that did not face the brunt of the pachyderms previously.

People (in Village B) soon realized what had led to the conflict in their village and damaged the fence. Today both villages suffer. During our visit we saw what would once have been an electric fence tying to do the work of a barbed wire fence. It had plastic (and polythene) bags hanging at uniform intervals, apparently to ward off elephants. We repeatedly lament not getting funds (especially from the state) to resolve conflict and when we did, we could not make it work.

The story-tellers then shared names of organizations and the projects they had begun and asked whey none of them worked towards logical conclusions.

Thanks Karpagam Chelliah for the image.

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