Mother-Daughter Killed by Wild Elephants in Assam

A woman-daughter duo was killed by wild elephants in Assam's Udalguri district, officials said on Tuesday.

The duo died while they were sleeping in their house, the officials stated. Superintendent of Police (SP), Udalguri district, Pushkin Jain mentioned that the incident happened on Monday night in the Dimakuchi area - a locality adjacent to an elephant corridor.

He said: "A 60-year-old mother and her daughter aged about 40 years were sleeping in one of the houses that the elephants destroyed in the locality. After the elephants left the area, the bodies were found."

The deceased were identified as Lalmek Karmakar and her daughter Apu Karmakar. The bodies were sent for post-mortem at Udalguri Civil Hospital. Residents protested against the Forest Department on Tuesday morning, claiming ignorance of the increasing man-animal conflict.

"Our houses have been damaged by wild elephants that have previously emerged from the jungle. We lost two human lives because the forest officials ignored the problem despite our repeated pleas," one of the protesting locals said.

Notably, to mitigate the man-animal conflict, Hasti Kanya of Assam, 67-year-old Parbati Baruah have done a lot of work. Kanyam is popularly known as "Elephant Girl" while Baruah is India's first woman mahout (elephant keeper) who was conferred the Padma Shri award last year.

Born in the Gauripur royal family in the Goalpara district of Assam, Barua and her father Prakritish Barua caught their first elephant together in the Kachugaon woods of Kokrajhar district when she was 14.

Baruah spent 40 years reducing human-elephant conflicts and fighting against gender stereotypes in this profession. Human-elephant confrontations have a long history in Assam, and Baruah was instrumental in developing government regulations to keep them under control.

She developed into a master at taming wild elephants. Her expertise on the behaviour of elephants made her well-known not just in Assam but also in nearby states like West Bengal and Odisha. 

—IANS