GUWAHATI, July 8 - The Forest department may have temporarily shelved its move to transport four elephants to Ahmedabad�s Jagannath Temple, but it has landed in fresh trouble and will have to do some more head-scratching. The Centre has asked the State Forest department to institute an inquiry into the antecedents of the four elephants which were proposed to be transported to Gujarat.
This was communicated in a letter by the Inspector General attached to the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change who is also the Project Elephant Director to the State�s Chief Wildlife warden.
Doubts were raised over two of the four elephants and there were allegations that they were not captive born. The �Indian Elephant� is a Schedule-I animal under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, and Section 9 of the Act prohibits capture of elephants from the wild. Capturing of wild elephants is permitted only under very limited circumstances as provided in Section 11 and 12 of the Act.
According to the permission issued by the Wildlife Warden, the elephants that were to be transported were �Joytara� and �Rupsing� owned by Piyal Moran of Digboi, �Rani� owned by Jogi Nath Pegu of Tinsukia and �Babulal� owned by Moneswar Moran of Doomdooma.
Sources alleged that the names of two of the elephants did not figure in the list of �captive elephants� prepared by the then Wildlife Warden last year as per instructions of MoEF.
The probe order reportedly comes after the allegations and complaints, which were also published in the media.
The matter was also raised in the PIL filed in the Gauhati High Court challenging the transportation of the animals in hazardous conditions.
According to the allegations, two of the elephants were caught from the wild and domesticated. Microchips on the two elephants were implanted later and ownership certificates issued to facilitate the process of their transportation to Ahmedabad.
The State Forest department had been insisting that all the four elephants are captive born.
In the State of Assam till December 30, 2018, there were 905 captive elephants in the records of the Forest department. In most of the cases, ownership certificates (OC) have been issued to the owners of the elephants and in other cases provisional ownership certificates. All these elephants have been implanted with microchips provided by the DFO of Assam State Zoo, who is the custodian of the chips which contains the name of the elephants, sex, age, status of ownership certificate and name and address of the owner.
Prior to 2003, there was not much transportation of elephants from the State to other States. After 2007, 61 elephants were transported to outside States for specific periods and none of them were returned back to Assam. Surprisingly, the Forest department has also not initiated action against any of the owners for cancellation of their ownership certificates and to bring back the borrowed elephants.
