The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has tasked a committee constituted by a Union Ministry with looking into the death of wild elephants on the rail tracks that link Tamil Nadu and Kerala through the forest areas of Coimbatore and Palakkad districts.

The Central Monitoring Committee, constituted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), is dealing with Project Elephant.

The NGT took suo motu cognisance of the death of elephants on the basis of the report, ‘Night, early morning trains cause most elephant deaths,’ published in The Hindu on May 29, 2021. The report said trains that plied between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. had caused the death of seven out of eight elephants on the two lines, A and B, between the Kottekad and Madukkarai stations in the last five years.

The Bench, headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel, judicial members Justices Sudhir Agarwal, M. Sathyanarayanan and Brijesh Sethi and expert member Nagin Nanda, asked the committee to look into the issue in coordination with the Railways, the Wildlife Institute of India and the States of Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/panel-to-look-into-the-death-of-elephants-on-rail-lines/article35260122.ece