This is the time farmers in Wayanad are spending sleepless nights guarding their paddy crop inside, or on the fringes of, the forests of the hill district.
In the dark, many farmers look for elephants and other wild animals from enclosures set up in their farms or treetops.
Usual strategies to scare them away are not effective these days. As the animals have grown accustomed to the sight of fire and the sounds of firecrackers and drums, they raid the fields fearlessly.
“A herd of elephants destroyed paddy that was nearing harvest on two acres of my field in a month,” Viswanathan of Kavikkal, a marginal farmer at Chekadi, a hamlet on the fringes of the South Wayanad Forest Division, says. He has spent ₹50,000 for the cultivation so far, including rent for the land.
“As many as 153 farmers, including 93 tribal farmers, have cultivated paddy on 200 acres of the 250 acres of land under the Chekadi Padashekharam. Nearly 30 acres of paddy crops have been destroyed by wild animals this season,” Mr. Viswanathan, who is also the secretary of the Padashekharam, said.
Hundreds of farmers who live near the forests under the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary and the South and North Wayanad Forest Divisions face a similar fate.
Electric fences
To curb wild animal attacks, the three-tier local administrative bodies and the Forest Department have dug trenches and installed electric fences running to several kilometres on the forest borders. But the animals enter human habitats and farms after destroying them, Ajayan Vishwa Mandiram, a farmer, said.
Compensation
“The Forest Department is now paying a compensation of ₹11,000 for the loss of a hectare of paddy, but we spend ₹65,000 for cultivation,” he said.
“Every year, we get more than 4,000 complaints from farmers on crop loss. We also know that the compensation is very low, but the allocated fund is only so much,” a forest official says.
However, the department has submitted a comprehensive project that costs ₹574 crore to the government to mitigate the man-animal conflict in the district, the official adds.
