Tusker crushes 2 near Ranchi

RANCHI: A male elephant crushed to death two people in separate incidents in Ranchi district late on Wednesday evening.
Shambhu Lohra (60), a resident of Jariya village under Silli Block, was returning home from a local weekly village market on a bicycle when he fell on the way of a tusker which was patrolling the area for food. Lohra’s attempt to get to safety proved futile as the tusker mowed him down.
An hour later, Maheshwar Mahto was mowed down by the same elephant near Biridih village in Sonahatu block.The 66-year-old was returning home after grazing his buffaloes when he came face to face with the elephant. Both Mahto and Lohra died instantaneously, forest officials said.
Ranvir Singh, a forest officer at Ranchi’s Bundu range, said the killer elephant was an adult male which was camping in the area for more than aweek to feed on harvest. “It is possible that the elephant was intimidated by suddenly presence of the two individuals and attacked instantaneously,” Singh said.
The forest department announced a compensation of Rs 50,000 each to the families of the deceased.
Thursday’s incidents were the second and third such casee of human-elephant conflict in the past 72 hours. On Tuesday, two herders from Aurangabad in Bihar, who were camping in a tent near a village in Kamdara in Gumla, were crushed by another adult tusker.
Although a state-level database was launched in May to record the sightings and positions of migrating elephant herds to reduce collateral damage through early warning system, the state forest officials are finding it tough to locate lone tuskers.
“In both cases, the killers were lone tuskers. Though a herd can be traced, tracking a tusker is difficult. We lack GPS trackers and trained men, both of which are essential to fight the problem of human-elephant confrontations,” a range officer said, requesting anonymity.
Elephants have killed nearly 1,300 people in Jharkhand in last 17 years.