The Night Watch: 150 Farmers Protect UP’s Elephants

One unique coexistence model has been developed by people living around Katarniaghat forests of Uttar Pradesh. Each evening, after a hard day’s labor on their fields, over 150 farmers from these villages set out in the elephant corridors adjacent to their homes using only flashlights and whistles. The purpose is to avoid any fatal incidents where elephants passing through their natural habitat encounter people living around. It is not an initiative by the government but one that has been taken by people as there have been instances in the past where human-elephant conflict resulted in deaths.

Through the formation of voluntary night watches, the residents of this village have lowered the possibility of an accidental meeting and thus made it safer for the elephants to migrate along their usual migratory paths.

It is part of a larger, more quiet phenomenon in rural India wherein conservation is being handled by the people on their own instead of waiting for a solution to come from the top.