Coimbatore: To facilitate elephants cross railway tracks in forest area and end the jumbo hits by trains, the Forest department has planned to construct ramps at vulnerable points.
“As an immediate measure, ramps will be built in vital elephant crossing points. It would help the jumbos to move away quickly on seeing an approaching train. Currently the outer space along the railway track is steep and elephants take time to cross, which results in hits,” said A Periyasamy (In-charge), District Forest officer (DFO), Coimbatore.
A team of officials led by the DFO, Madukkarai Forest Range Officer M Senthil Kumar, assistant divisional engineer Southern Railway Palakkad Division, T
Loganayaki and environmentalists made a joint inspection along the two-km stretch of the railway track that runs through the forest cover.
To begin with, the Forest department has planned to construct four ramps on the elephant crossing points on the track between Puthuppathi to Ettimadai area. While the works to develop the ramps will be taken up on a war footing, an underpass will also come up at a curve along the track.
“In the straight tracks, the loco pilots will have a good visibility. However at this curve, the loco pilot may not notice the elephant and lead to hits. It was in this spot that the adult female elephant was hit by the train in the last incident,” said A Periyasamy.
Constructing an underpass is a long-term project, as it requires the Forest department to get the nod of the state government and also requires huge financial funding.
Meanwhile, the World Wide Fund (WWF) has proposed to install cameras along the elephant pathways and study their movements. “By fixing cameras, we will study the frequency of elephant crossings through a particular pathway, time of their movement and also identify the jumbos that frequently cross the tracks. This will help to initiate suitable mitigation measures,” said D Boominathan, Landscape Coordinator, WWF-India.
The WWF has identified around seven pathways where cameras will be fixed in 20 locations in a couple of days to study the movement of animals. “In future the camera traps can be made into real time monitoring and even bring about an alert system,” he said.
During the inspection, the officials have also suggested clearing the vegetation along both the sides of the track to improve visibility of loco pilots, set up watch towers, increase patrolling during night time to track elephant herds and sensitize the loco pilots on elephant movement.
