Assam is paying villagers ₹500 a month to stand between their communities and wild elephants. Under the Gaja Mitra scheme, notified by the state's Environment, Forest and Climate Change Department, teams of eight local volunteers are being formed at 80 identified vulnerable locations across eight high-conflict districts, trained to assist forest staff in steering elephants away from settlements during the months when crops are ripening and encounters peak.
The scale of the problem the scheme addresses is stark. Over the past decade, human-elephant conflict in Assam has claimed 1,147 human lives and 246 elephants, and over a 23-year span the figures rise to about 1,400 people and 1,209 elephants. In 2026 alone, 53 people had lost their lives to human-animal conflict in the state, with the highest toll — 11 deaths — recorded in Baksa Forest Division.
Background
Human-elephant conflict in Assam is not a story about elephants straying into places they do not belong. It is a story about a landscape that has been progressively partitioned beneath animals that move across it on routes established over generations.
Asian elephants are wide-ranging animals with substantial daily food requirements — an adult consumes well over a hundred kilograms of vegetation a day — and they move seasonally along traditional corridors between feeding grounds. In Assam, those corridors run through a landscape that has been steadily converted to agriculture, settlement, plantation and infrastructure. When a herd follows a route it has used for decades and finds a village, a railway line or a paddy field where forest used to be, the resulting encounter is what gets recorded as conflict.
The timing is what makes the conflict so predictable, and so tractable in principle. Elephant incursions into human areas peak when paddy is standing in the fields. A ripening paddy crop is, from an elephant's perspective, an unusually concentrated and easily digestible food source — far more efficient than foraging across degraded forest. So the animals come, and they come at the same point in the agricultural calendar every year, to broadly the same places.
That predictability cuts both ways for the people living there. A farmer knows roughly when the risk will arrive but stands to lose an entire season's crop in a single night, and the encounters that kill people typically happen in darkness, when villagers attempt to drive a herd away from fields or are caught between animals while moving between houses.
The mortality is close to symmetrical, which is the aspect of Assam's conflict that most distinguishes it. Over 23 years, roughly 1,400 people and 1,209 elephants died — humans and elephants dying in comparable numbers. Elephant deaths are not primarily the result of retaliation by villagers. Electrocution and train accidents have remained the leading causes of elephant mortality: animals contacting sagging or illegally tapped power lines, and herds struck by trains where railway lines cross migration routes. The state has identified 33 elephant corridors along railway tracks in an attempt to reduce collisions.
The elephant population itself is not in decline, which is important context for interpreting the conflict. Assam's 2024 elephant population estimation, conducted using the Direct Visual Total Count method, put the state's elephants at 5,828 — an increase of 128 animals over the preceding seven years. The distribution matters as much as the total: 68 per cent of Assam's elephants are found in protected areas such as national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, 30.5 per cent in managed forests, and 1.5 per cent in revenue areas. A stable or slowly growing elephant population moving through a landscape where human settlement continues to expand is a recipe for more frequent contact, not less, regardless of how well the animals themselves are doing.
Against that background, Assam's mitigation efforts have included deploying forest personnel and installing solar fencing. Gaja Mitra represents a different approach — one that pays and organises the affected community itself rather than relying solely on departmental staff.
Key Details
The Gaja Mitra scheme was approved by the Assam Cabinet and subsequently notified by the Environment, Forest and Climate Change Department. Its provisions:
- Districts covered: eight of the most conflict-prone — Goalpara, Udalguri, Nagaon, Baksa, Sonitpur, Golaghat, Jorhat and Biswanath.
- Locations: 80 vulnerable locations identified across those districts.
- Team structure: a rapid action team of eight local community members at each identified location, trained to assist forest staff in conflict mitigation.
- Duration of deployment: operating during the peak conflict months, a period of around six months coinciding with the paddy cultivation season.
- Volunteer allowance: ₹500 per month.
- Equipment provided: a uniform, a megaphone and a torch.
- Death in service: any volunteer death during elephant depredation is to be treated as on-duty, with ex-gratia support of ₹5 lakh to the next of kin.
- Habitat component: development of elephant habitat by planting bamboo and Napier grass to provide an alternative food source, so that animals are less drawn to human settlements.
The equipment list repays attention because it reveals the intended method. A megaphone and a torch are tools for detecting and deterring at a distance — spotting a herd early and turning it before it reaches a village, using noise and light rather than confrontation. They are not tools for physically driving animals. The approach depends on early warning, which is why local people are the right personnel: they know the paths, the fields and the times.
The ₹500 monthly allowance is modest by any measure, and it is worth being clear-eyed about what it represents. It is not a wage. It functions as a token honorarium and a formalisation of a role that villagers in these areas have long performed unpaid and unrecognised — watching for elephants and raising the alarm. The ₹5 lakh ex-gratia provision, and the classification of a volunteer's death as occurring on duty, is arguably the more consequential clause, since it converts an informal and dangerous community practice into one carrying formal recognition and compensation.
Six months of deployment per year is also a deliberate design choice rather than a limitation. Because incursions cluster around the ripening paddy, a permanent standing force would spend much of the year with little to do, and the cost of maintaining one across 80 locations would be many times higher. Concentrating the effort into the window when risk is greatest is the efficient approach. The corresponding risk is continuity: a team that disperses for half the year has to be reassembled, retrained and re-equipped each season, and volunteers who found other work in the interval may not return.
The habitat component is the element that could alter the underlying dynamic rather than manage its symptoms. Planting bamboo and Napier grass to create alternative forage addresses the reason elephants enter fields in the first place. Its limitation is time: plantations take seasons to establish and must be large enough and well enough placed to compete with a paddy field for an elephant's attention.
At a Glance
| Period | Human deaths | Elephant deaths | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 years (reported span) | About 1,400 | 1,209 | Near-symmetrical mortality across both species |
| 10 years (2016-2026) | 1,147 | 246 | Electrocution and train accidents the leading causes of elephant deaths |
| 2026 (year to date) | 53 | Not separately cited | Highest toll in Baksa Forest Division, with 11 deaths |
| Goalpara Forest Division, 2016-2026 | 195 | Not separately cited | Single worst division over the decade |
| Goalpara, 23-year figure | 175 | — | Historic district-level total |
| Udalguri, 23-year figure | 168 (plus 34 injuries) | — | Historic district-level total |
One apparent inconsistency in the table deserves explanation rather than concealment: Goalpara's 23-year figure of 175 deaths is lower than the 195 deaths attributed to Goalpara Forest Division over 2016-2026. Forest divisions and districts are not identical administrative units and their boundaries do not necessarily coincide, and the two figures come from different reporting exercises with different definitions. They should be read as separate measurements rather than a contradiction — but the discrepancy is a caution against treating any single conflict statistic as definitive.
Local Impact
On the eight districts. Goalpara, Udalguri, Nagaon, Baksa, Sonitpur, Golaghat, Jorhat and Biswanath are agricultural districts where a substantial share of households depend on paddy. For these communities, elephant conflict is not an occasional wildlife encounter but a recurring seasonal threat to income, property and life. Goalpara's 195 deaths over a decade in its forest division, and Baksa's 11 deaths in 2026 alone, describe a level of risk that would be treated as a public emergency if the cause were anything other than wildlife.
On crop and property loss. Deaths are the most visible cost but not the most common one. Far more households lose standing crops, stored grain and damaged houses than lose family members. Villagers in conflict-affected areas of Assam have pressed for fair compensation for these losses alongside effective mitigation — a demand that reflects a basic asymmetry: the elephants are protected by law and their conservation is a public good, while the cost of coexisting with them falls on some of the state's poorer rural households.
On the volunteers themselves. The people signing up for Gaja Mitra teams are undertaking genuinely hazardous work for ₹500 a month. The scheme's own ex-gratia clause is an acknowledgement that volunteers may be killed doing it. That the state has provided for this is right; that the compensating allowance is ₹500 monthly is a fact readers can weigh for themselves.
On elephants. Conservation outcomes are inseparable from the human side. Communities that bear uncompensated losses become less tolerant of elephants, and reduced tolerance translates into retaliatory killing, poisoning and pressure to relocate herds. A scheme that gives villagers a role, some recognition and a small payment is also, in a practical sense, an elephant conservation measure — it buys tolerance.
What the Lakhipur experience implies for the other seven districts. The most useful lesson from Goalpara is about sequencing. The volunteers there were operating with 47 kilometres of solar fencing already in place, solar lighting in the worst zones, and a WhatsApp alert network connecting villages. The human effort was amplified by physical barriers and instant communication. If Gaja Mitra teams are constituted in Udalguri, Nagaon, Baksa, Sonitpur, Golaghat, Jorhat and Biswanath without equivalent fencing and warning systems, they will be asked to achieve the same outcome with a fraction of the tools — and the scheme's own equipment list, a uniform, a megaphone and a torch, does not include any of the infrastructure that appears to have made the difference in Lakhipur.
On infrastructure. The dominance of electrocution and train strikes among elephant deaths points to causes that community volunteering cannot address. Sagging power lines and unfenced railway crossings are engineering problems requiring utility and railway investment. The identification of 33 elephant corridors along railway tracks is a step toward that, but corridor identification is only useful if it changes how trains are operated or how tracks are built through those stretches.
What Happens Next
There is strong evidence that focused effort works, and it comes from one of the eight districts the scheme covers. In Lakhipur, a recognised conflict hotspot in Goalpara near the Assam-Meghalaya boundary, human deaths fell from 19 in 2022 to 2 in 2025 — a reduction of nearly 90 per cent over three years.
The measures behind that decline are documented and specific. Around 47 kilometres of solar-powered fencing was installed, protecting at least 18 villages in Lakhipur Circle and benefiting approximately 1,440 households. Solar street lights were installed in conflict-prone zones, rechargeable torchlights were distributed to volunteers, and an early warning system was set up over a WhatsApp network — a low-cost solution that turns the problem of spotting a herd at night into a message reaching every village within seconds.
The work was carried out by the Goalpara Division of the Assam Forest Department together with Aaranyak, a biodiversity conservation non-profit, and it was delivered by people: 70 Elephant Conservation Network volunteers, 40 Gaja Mitras, and Forest Department personnel. Moupran Gayon, the Lakhipur Forest Range Officer, cited the mitigation measures as "key factors in lowering direct encounters". Circle Officer Sailen Dutta Das praised the collaborative effort and called for sustained interdepartmental action, while Dr Bibhuti Prasad Lahkar, a conservation scientist with Aaranyak, set out the departmental roles in conflict mitigation.
Lakhipur is therefore not merely an encouraging anecdote — it is a working demonstration of the Gaja Mitra model operating alongside physical infrastructure and a communications system, in one of the districts the statewide scheme targets. The important qualification is that the volunteers were only one component. The 47 kilometres of solar fencing and the early warning network were doing substantial work too, and a volunteer team deployed without that supporting infrastructure would be attempting the same task with a torch and a megaphone alone.
Comparable results have been reported at smaller scale elsewhere. In Gosaihat village near the Maliata reserve, a low-cost seasonal solar fence installed in November 2023 protected standing crops well enough that farmers harvested 90 per cent of their crop in the following season.
The immediate measure of Gaja Mitra will be whether the 80 teams are actually constituted, trained and active during the paddy season in all eight districts, and whether the allowances and equipment reach volunteers. Schemes of this design fail more often through incomplete implementation than through faulty concept.
The habitat plantations are the longer-term variable. Bamboo and Napier grass need time to establish, and their effect on elephant movement can only be assessed over multiple seasons. If the plantations succeed in holding herds away from cultivated land, that is a structural improvement; if they are too small or poorly sited, they will not change animal behaviour regardless of how well the volunteer teams perform.
Two things are worth watching that the scheme does not address. The first is compensation for crop and property loss, which remains the daily grievance in affected villages. The second is infrastructure — power line safety and railway crossings — which drives elephant mortality and therefore the conservation side of the ledger.
A reasonable benchmark already exists, and it is Lakhipur's own trajectory: a fall from 19 deaths to 2 across three years, in a place where volunteers, fencing, lighting and an alert network were deployed together. If the seven other districts show movement in that direction over the coming seasons, the model will have proved transferable. If deaths hold near current levels while volunteer teams are nominally in place, the conclusion will be that the people were never the missing element.
No public assessment of Gaja Mitra's performance across a full conflict season has been released, and the honest position is that the scheme is too new to evaluate.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Gaja Mitra scheme?
It is an Assam government scheme, notified by the Environment, Forest and Climate Change Department, under which teams of eight local volunteers are formed at identified conflict-prone locations to assist forest staff in mitigating human-elephant conflict. It also includes habitat development through bamboo and Napier grass plantation.
Which districts does it cover?
Eight high-conflict districts: Goalpara, Udalguri, Nagaon, Baksa, Sonitpur, Golaghat, Jorhat and Biswanath, with 80 vulnerable locations identified across them.
What do Gaja Mitra volunteers receive?
A monthly allowance of ₹500, along with a uniform, a megaphone and a torch. If a volunteer dies during elephant depredation, the death is treated as on-duty and ₹5 lakh in ex-gratia support goes to the next of kin.
How many people die in human-elephant conflict in Assam?
Over the past decade, 1,147 people and 246 elephants died. Over a 23-year span, the figures are approximately 1,400 people and 1,209 elephants. In 2026, 53 people had died in human-animal conflict, with the highest toll of 11 in Baksa Forest Division.
Why do elephants enter villages?
Their traditional movement corridors have been converted to agriculture, settlement and infrastructure, and standing paddy is a concentrated, easily digestible food source. Incursions peak when paddy is ripening, which is why Gaja Mitra teams operate during the roughly six-month paddy cultivation season.
What kills elephants in Assam?
Electrocution and train accidents remain the leading causes of elephant mortality — contact with power lines and collisions where railway lines cross migration routes. The state has identified 33 elephant corridors along railway tracks to reduce collisions.
Does the scheme cover crop compensation?
The scheme as described concerns volunteer teams, equipment, ex-gratia for volunteer deaths and habitat development. Villagers in conflict-affected areas have separately pressed for fair compensation for crop and property losses.
Is there evidence any of this works?
Yes. In Lakhipur, a conflict hotspot in Goalpara, human deaths fell from 19 in 2022 to 2 in 2025. The measures included roughly 47 km of solar-powered fencing protecting at least 18 villages and about 1,440 households, solar street lights, rechargeable torchlights for volunteers and a WhatsApp-based early warning network, delivered by the Goalpara Division of the Assam Forest Department with the non-profit Aaranyak, 70 Elephant Conservation Network volunteers and 40 Gaja Mitras. No statewide assessment of Gaja Mitra across a full conflict season has been published.
How many elephants are there in Assam?
The 2024 elephant population estimation, using the Direct Visual Total Count method, put Assam's elephants at 5,828, an increase of 128 over the preceding seven years. Of these, 68 per cent are in protected areas, 30.5 per cent in managed forests and 1.5 per cent in revenue areas.
Sources
- The Assam Tribune — Assam unveils the Gaja Mitra scheme to tackle human-elephant conflicts
- The Assam Tribune — report on 1,400 people and 1,209 elephants killed in Assam's man-animal conflict over 23 years
- EastMojo — Assam notifies the Gaja Mitra Scheme as elephant-human conflict reaches crisis levels
- The Sentinel (Assam) — Assam's escalating man-animal conflict claims 1,147 lives in a decade
- Hub Network — human-elephant conflict deaths over ten years, including elephant mortality causes
- Outlook Traveller — Assam launches Gaja Mitra to curb human-animal conflicts
- The News Mill — human deaths decline sharply in Assam's Lakhipur human-elephant conflict hotspot
- Aaranyak and Assam Forest Department (Goalpara Division) — reported mitigation work and outcomes in Lakhipur
- Forest Department, Government of Assam — Elephant Population Estimation in Assam 2024
- Land Conflict Watch — villagers in Goalpara demanding fair compensation and effective mitigation
- Akashvani News / newsonair.gov.in — Assam Cabinet approves the Gaja Mitra Scheme