Krishnagiri: As nightfall, three villagers rest in worry, scarily imagining who could be the next victim to be attacked by the wild elephants to which they have recently lost one life.
For 60-year-old K. Madesh, a migrant farmer who stayed in the Azhiyalam village, near Hosur in Krishnagiri district was killed by the wild elephant when the victim was heading towards his leased field in the early hours of July 23.
He is the first victim to die from the man-animal conflict in Azhiyalam though the people have been facing this menace for many decades. Others have been chased or attacked by the crop raiding jumbos that enter farms.
“Each house has one horrifying memory to say how their men have escaped from the wild elephants that charged or attacked them,” 54-year-old M. Venkatesh, the village headman for Ramapuram told DC.
Azhiyalam, Podurpallam and Ramapuram are the neighbourhood villages in the forest fringe, near Hosur of Krishnagiri district. Ramapuram has 60 houses and another 50 in two other villages.
These villages has forest boundary in one side and on the other the perennial South Pennar River flows, close to the Chennai-Bengaluru national highway.
With fertile soil and no water problem for the agriculture, the farmers here cultivate paddy, vegetables and Banana are what an elephant loves to eat. This ideal location from where the wild elephants can get food and water at one place leading to the trouble for the local people. “Every time while serving night food for my relative men, I do with a prayer that should not be their last meal,” 55-year-old R. Saroja Amma told DC.
The villagers who risk their life in protecting their crops from the marauding elephants were brutally killed or injured to live with permanent disability as in the case of Krishnaveni of Azhiyalam village.
The woman was attacked by the wild jumbo when the victim was at Azhiyalam village that day. She escaped death with multiple fractures. Her hospitalization expenses have left her family in penury. “Fortunately alive but has to live with permanent disability” Krishnaveni said before narrating the horrific movement, when the woman encountered the wild elephant that attacked her while returning home from Azhiyalam.
“The elephant that came out of the bush has caught hold and lifted with its trunk. The animal then tossed me like a toy and threw me on the ground and moved from the place leaving me alive,” Krishnaveni recalled with disbelief.
