About 150 wild elephants are roaming the Garo Hills area of Sherpur and Jamalpur. The Forest Department says the animals, which came from Meghalaya in India, have been unable to return to their home range for the past two years because the gates in the border fence are closed.
According to forest officials, the elephants move in several groups, including 25 to 30 calves, across about 12,000 hectares of forest in the two districts and the land around it. Unable to find enough food in the forest, they often enter villages and farmland.
Ten to fifteen elephants first came from Meghalaya around 2000, and their numbers have since grown through breeding. Herds once moved freely between the border forests of the two countries. In 2007 about 50 km of barbed-wire fence went up along the Sherpur and Jamalpur border, with 44 gates and 11 underpasses over rivers and streams left for elephants. The Forest Department has asked the Indian authorities several times to open the gates but has not had the response it hoped for.
The losses are large. Forest Department figures show that human-elephant conflict destroyed crops on about 435 hectares in Sherpur in the 2024-25 and 2025-26 fiscal years, and that 10 people and four wild elephants died in such conflict over the same period.
Joseph Marak, a farmer in Panihata, Nalitabari, said there is no year when elephants do not damage his crops, and he cannot bring his paddy home properly. Ashalata, a woman farmer from the same area, said that when the paddy ripens families stay up all night guarding it, and still cannot save all of it.
Professor M A Aziz of the zoology department at Jahangirnagar University said conflict rises when elephants' routes are blocked, and that solving it needs Bangladesh and India to act together. The two countries signed a protocol on transboundary elephant conservation in December 2020, he said, but there has been no significant progress since.
At a meeting at Madhutila Eco Park in Nalitabari on 10 October, Environment, Forest and Climate Change Minister Abdul Awal Mintoo said talks with India would be started under the protocol and India asked to open the gates, and that Sherpur's forests would be developed as a safe habitat for elephants.
Reporting: Samakal (Sherpur)
Photo: Bipul Ahmed official / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Samakal
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