NEW DELHI - The future well-being of elephants in India is in doubt after a government amendment that has relaxed rules on the transfer of ownership of elephants in private captivity and their transportation in the country.

The change in law has been defended as a measure to help those struggling to look after the animals and would like to pass them on to others. But it has also raised concerns that it will further encourage the illegal capture of wild elephants – a practice that still continues – to meet demand for these animals.

Fewer than 50,000 Asian elephants live in the wild, with more than half of them in India.

The country has 2,675 captive elephants, according to a 2019 estimate. Most of them are in private hands and put to work for entertainment, tourism and religious purposes. Many are also used at illegal timber logging sites.

The Upper House of Parliament cleared the Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Bill on Dec 8, permitting an exception for the transfer of ownership and transport of a captive elephant for “religious or any other purpose” by a person with a valid certificate of ownership. The Bill has yet to be enacted.

This is a climbdown from 2003, when an amendment prohibited commercial transactions in captive wildlife. Any transfer of such animals beyond a state’s borders must be reported to the relevant authorities. But the trade persisted under the cover of gift deeds. “People started gifting elephants after the 2003 amendment,” said Mr Alok Hisarwala, an animal rights lawyer and founder of the Centre for Research on Animal Rights. “It was shown as a non-commercial transaction, but obviously it was a commercial transaction because elephants are very valuable.”

The latest relaxation, which includes the broad ambit of “any other purpose”, has left those who have spent years campaigning for the welfare of India’s elephants disheartened and alarmed at the greater risk of capture that the wild populations are now exposed to.

Ms Suparna Ganguly, one of the authors of a 2010 government-commissioned report on ways to protect elephants in India, said she feels “a sense of deep sadness” to see the progress achieved since 1972, when India’s Wildlife Protection Act was enacted, rolled back.

“There will be a race now of people wanting to acquire elephants... entire lines of illegal capture and trade will open up,” she said.

A coveted domestic animal, the Asian elephant is also among the species accorded the highest protection under India’s wildlife protection law.

A 2011 report by a senior Indian Forest Service officer had documented evidence of a nexus behind the illegal capture of wild elephants from forests in the north-east to feed demand from temples in south India.

Even today, ownership certificates of captive elephants transferred out of their home states in the north-east often have little or no detail about their origin, raising suspicion that they may have been captured from the wild.

The Dec 8 amendment follows a longstanding campaign to relax elephant ownership and transfer rules by certain sections, including those in Kerala, the southern state where elephant parades at annual temple festivals are especially popular.

Concerns had been raised by many, including actors and politicians, over the fall in Kerala’s captive elephant population – from 900 in 2008 to around 440 now, and its impact on temple festivals. The amendment has led to hopes of a fresh influx of captive elephants to the state.

“There were nearly 1,000 (captive) elephants at one point in Kerala. So if we get to that many now, it would be good,” said Mr P. Sasikumar, general secretary of the Kerala Elephant Owners Federation.

Few believe the supply of hundreds of these animals will come only from a non-wild population.

Veterinarian K. K. Sarma said captive elephants can breed under certain conditions, but they cannot produce a sustainable population to feed the long-term demand for these animals. “The captive elephant population is a dying population,” he said.

This is because the wild conditions that an elephant, a highly social animal, thrives in cannot be reproduced in captivity. “Their physical, nutritional and emotional requirements are very difficult to understand and meet,” he noted.

Elephants have a gestational period of nearly two years – the longest for any mammal – and Dr Sarma noted only a few government forest camps in India with “near-natural” conditions, like open grazing, record births in captivity.

“We know elephants are being traded in but at least a label of illegality has been there. If that is removed and change of ownership liberalised, it will open the floodgates for their illegal capture.”

The wider and long-term implications of the 2022 amendment are “very, very dark”, said Ms Ganguly. “We will become another Thailand,” she said. This is an allusion to the possibility that India, like Thailand, could one day have more elephants in captivity than in the wild, with these animals forced to work under abusive conditions.

India has a deadly problem of human-elephant conflict, a result of its growing influence from human activity that has led to the animals’ habitat loss and fragmentation. As many as 1,401 human and 301 elephant deaths were reported from 2018-2020, along with extensive crop damage when the animals raided cultivated fields.

Such encounters have led those at the conflict’s front line to perceive these animals as a pest at best and a deadly menace at worst, with increasingly strident calls demanding the government to capture rogue elephants.

Discussions on the Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Bill in Parliament referenced this growing toll with the suggestion that captured elephants be transported to places where these animals can be looked after by private individuals.

The amendment has prompted fears that elephants captured by authorities to stem the human-elephant conflict – now held in state forest camps – could one day end up as captive elephants. “This is my worst fear and I hope to God it is not true,” said Mr Hisarwala.

The failure to prevent human intrusion into core elephant habitat areas and land meant for elephant corridors has flushed out the animals at rates faster than ever before. “And they want to capture and let human beings look after these elephants, ones that we have not been able to look after in the wild,” Ms Ganguly said. “This is an extremely flawed logic. They are not looking at the bigger picture of protection of landscapes, protection of villagers, protection of their lands.”

The solution, Mr Hisarwala said, must lie in abolishing private ownership of elephants. “Why are we linking the cultural use of an animal to a capitalist and exploitative system of ownership,” he said.

The government must take over the upkeep of captive elephants, and temples allowed to requisition these animals for certain ceremonies. “Ultimately, we must commit to phasing out this practice in the next five or 10 years,” Mr Hisarwala said. “Substitution is the answer,” Mr Hisarwala said, referring to robot elephants created by entrepreneurs in Kerala and their recent use to replace live ones at festivals.

“Putting a live elephant out there among crowds risks the lives of both the animal and humans,” he added.