Save our dear friend Jumbo

Life of every animal on this planet is as important as the life of a human being. Sometimes in our arrogance we forget that this planet is also the habitat for millions of animals. We tend to think that we rule this planet and those who don't fit according to our plans have to die.

Elephants are the gentle giants. Though they are really huge in size but by nature they really calm and peaceful animals. They live as a group where the older elephants look after the young ones. You will be surprised to know that these huge animals are vegetarians and they only eat plants and trees as food. They need high intake of nutrients to sustain they body hence eat a lot of plants.

The problem starts here, these days the forest land is rapidly shrinking and they hardly get enough plants and trees to fulfill their nutrient needs. In the process of finding food they end up reaching the human habitats which have come really near to the forests and in many places humans have settled down the cutting down forests. This leads to human-elephant conflicts which have taken lives of many elephants. Many of them are trapped and killed every year. Many elephants also end up dying by coming in-front of trains and trucks.

We need to understand that they are still living in their own habitat only, it is us who have gone into their place. We should respect every animal and understand that they have equal rights over the natural resources as we do. With great power comes great responsibilities, we as the most intelligent species on earth have to understand the value of diversity and the value each species have.

We are still working on recreating the lost species like dinosaurs and saber tooth. Mammoth, who is a distant relative of the elephant species are already extinct. Now, it is upon us to decide that do we want our next generation to see elephants and want them to read about elephants only in the books.

The Muthoot Group, one of India’s leading business conglomerates, in partnership with World Wild Fund for Nature- India (WWF-India) has launched a partnership for elephant conservation; the project is dedicated towards effective management of human-elephant conflict (HEC) and protecting the habitats of Asian elephants across six states in India. 

This partnership will catalyse and strengthen the existing efforts of managing HEC across these six states, in four priority landscapes and one priority site as earmarked by WWF-India. These include North Bank landscape in Arunachal Pradesh, Kaziranga and Karbi-AFnglong in Assam; Terai Arc landscape in Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; Western Ghats landscape in Tamil Nadu and Kerala and also some parts of northern West Bengal. This partnership will also help scale up the existing efforts by identifying strategic conflict management measures specific to each region and enforce legislation to protect elephants.

Group has been doing CSR , for over 800 years, perhaps even before the term was coined.This was done in terms of educational , health care etc for the 5000 odd workers of the Family who were employed for clearance of Forest area and plantations on an authorization given as “koop” , by the Maharajah of Travancore, nearly 800 years ago.

Elephants are also thought really sacred as one of our Hindu god Lord Ganesha also bears the face of elephant. This shows that in our tradition, we have always been people who respect and love animals.I was really happy to see that at-least someone is working towards saving these wonderful animals. Elephants or Jumbo was also the mascot of the asian games that took place in our country. Our country has always been proud of our natural resources and animals. 

I hope that because of these initiatives we would be able to create awareness about the problems Elephants face and could help them be safe in the home which we call earth,