Sri Lankan Governments Ignore a Science-Based Mitigation for Human-Elephant Conflict
This story and lead image were produced by Asia Democracy Chronicles.
Forty-seven-year-old Leilawathi Aluthgedara lives with her extended family in a cool red brick home by a running stream in Diyakapila, a village in central Sri Lanka. Just seven kilometers past the mighty Sigiriya Rock, one of the country’s most popular tourism spots, the agrarian community of 148 people boasts of fruit and vegetable farms, as well as hectares of rice paddies.
Yet despite Diyakapila’s idyllic landscape, Aluthgedara – a third-generation farmer — lives in fear.
“Most often I spend sleepless nights trying to stay awake to prevent elephants eating our crops,” she said. Among the methods she uses to protect her crops from the giant animals is an old machete attached by a string to a metal water drum.
“I bang away when the elephant approaches,” she explained. “The noise warns the animal that there are humans so hopefully it will run away.”
Sri Lanka is famous for its wild elephants, which are the largest among the subspecies of the endangered Asian elephant. Revered in Sri Lankan culture, elephants have become a major contributor to the country’s GDP, with elephant-focused tourism generating more than $1 billion (more than 41 percent of tourism revenues) in 2024 alone.
Yet especially in the last few years, the South Asian nation has also become infamous for having the worst human-elephant conflict (HEC) worldwide. Says a Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) official who declines to be named: “The density of our elephant range with civilians is a key reason for the human-elephant conflict clashes.”
Elephants raid farms for food such as bananas, paddy and sugar cane, a preference to the harsh bitter leaves in the forest. But conservationists also stress the role played by expanding infrastructure development and rural farms encroaching on the wildlife habitat in HEC.
Sri Lankans are now embroiled in a difficult debate that is pitting the protection of human activity against the survival of its rich biodiversity.
Most estimates say that between 2015 and 2024, about 3,500 elephants and nearly 1,200 humans died in Sri Lanka because of HEC. A recent NewsWire report meanwhile cited wildlife officials in saying that in the first seven weeks of this year, 44 elephants were killed, many of them from “gunshot wounds, the ingestion of poison, or contact with illegal electric fences set up by farmers to protect crops.” The DWC, the report said, also recorded 10 human deaths due to elephant attacks during the same period.
Shooting elephants
Five years ago, then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa ordered a national plan to be drawn up to address the problem. Experts headed by Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando came up with the 2020 National Action Plan for Human Elephant Conflict Mitigation (NAP).
A holistic approach to conservation, NAP advocates for wider stakeholder participation. And while it aims to protect settlements and cultivations from elephant depredation, it also emphasizes the need to keep elephants safe and thriving. Flexible key measures based on years of research and technology-grounded studies are divided into short-, medium-, and long-term, and include public awareness and continuing education.
Yet NAP has never been implemented in full. Instead, successive governments keep on trying out measures that had already failed and were nowhere near promoting co-existence. Lax punishment meted on those who kill elephants are also being seen as tacit approval for such acts, leading to more violence against the animals, which then become more aggressive.
Even Rajapaksa had all but ignored the NAP. Rather than starting with the short-term measures the plan recommended, such as setting up low-voltage electric fences, his administration began issuing shotguns to farmers. At least 5,000 guns were released to farmers – ostensibly to scare away elephants from raiding crops — before popular protests forced Rajapaksa to resign in July 2021.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that farmers did not fire their government-issued guns in the air to scare the elephants, but aimed straight at the animals, which eventually died a slow, painful death from their wounds. Several apparently had been shot several times.
Bhatiya, a popular elephant who died last year of gunshot wounds on many parts of his body, particularly his legs, had at least one gunshot to the head.
Officials have yet to stop arming farmers; by mid-2025, the government had released some 13,200 guns for crop protection. The current government of Anura Kumura Dissayanake has even been issuing more powerful 12-bore guns.
Last year, Agriculture Minister Kuragamage Don Lalkantha was widely quoted as telling farmers to “take any action that is possible” to protect their crops. Conservationists said that this was practically a go-signal for slaughtering elephants. Or as Sujeewa Jayasinghe, director at the Center for Eco-Cultural (CES) studies based in Diyakapila, tells Asia Democracy Chronicles (ADC), the policy will only contribute to more violence against wildlife.
Lalkantha has since clarified that he meant action against other animals, such as wild boars and monkeys, but elephant gunshot fatalities have been growing. Of the 397 elephant deaths the DWC recorded in 2025, 71 or nearly 18 percent were due to gunshot wounds. Most of the total deaths were also attributed to HEC. Dissayanake meanwhile told parliament last year that human fatalities –mostly farmers — from HEC now average 80 per year.
Crowded spaces
Wild elephants remain fiercely protected under the country’s Fauna and Flora Protection Ordinance No 22 of 2009. Unless it is a case of self-defense, harming, trapping, or killing an elephant is considered a criminal offense that can result in life imprisonment and fines of up to LKR 500,000 ($1,600). But the country’s HEC has become so serious that Buddhist monk Wanawasi Rahula Thera, guardian of the Namal Uyana forest and orchid garden, has called for more stringent punishment – even the death penalty — for elephant killers.
The problem, though, is that elephants and people are now finding themselves practically living cheek by jowl, primarily due to a sheer lack of land-use policy. Currently, only 30 percent of the reported 7,451 elephants in Sri Lanka live in non-residential habitats such as safari-parks. The majority live in areas in close proximity to humans and which are identified by conservationists as disturbed forests or land converted to human habitat.
A 2019 study observed: “We found elephant habitat without resident people covered 18.4 percent of Sri Lanka. The current extent of protected areas in Sri Lanka is 23.2 percent…. The inconsistency between elephant habitat without people and protected area extent is largely because some protected area categories (e.g. sanctuaries and proposed reserves) permit human habitation.”
Elephants also keep getting hit and killed by trains because railways have been built through traditional elephant paths. Last year, 46 elephants were killed through train collisions. So far this year, that number is at eight, despite new measures aimed at avoiding such incidents.
Jayasinghe’s research points to the loss of traditional agricultural practices as another contributing factor to HEC. In an ADC interview, he says that Sri Lanka’s elephant-human former peaceful co-existence “can be traced to traditional slash-and-burn cultivation practices when farmers cleared forest patches to grow crops temporarily.”
The animals ate post-harvest crops after farmers left for their next destination, he explains. But then modern farming based on settled communities disrupted that tradition. Coupled with human invasion of forests, elephants have turned to invading fields of tasty crops.
“In reality,” says Jayasinghe, “farmers love the elephants but are extremely scared of the attacks on their farms and livelihood and lives.”
Co-existence vs. separation
Conservationists have been urging officials to finally implement the NAP in full. During the brief interim government of President Ranil Wickremesinghe, some aspects of the NAP were carried out, such as the installation of seasonal electric fences. Instead of the task force suggested by the NAP, though, Wickremesinghe formed a presidential committee to oversee the HEC mitigation.
Still, to environmentalist Supun Lahiru Prakash, this and some of the interim government’s other actions that took the cue from the NAP “likely contributed to the reduction in human and elephant deaths in 2024—after nine consecutive years of increases.”
“However,” he wrote in a November 2025 opinion piece for the Daily Mirror, “with the change in government, the committee’s term and implementation of the National Action Plan have effectively ended. From the outset, we emphasized the need for the current government to implement the National Action Plan fully and correctly. Instead, the President dismissed it, and … instructed officials to form district-level committees in conflict-affected areas and prepare district action plans.”
Conservationists have noted that the current government seems to be leaning toward separating people and elephants instead of promoting a healthy co-existence as envisioned by the NAP. Indeed, while it appears to be following parts of the plan, its interpretation of these does not seem to reflect the spirit behind them.
For instance, GPS technology, which under NAP is a tool to study elephant movement and behavior, is now eyed by the wildlife department as useful for translocating the giant beasts. Conservationists have repeatedly emphasized that translocation does not work in HEC mitigation and can even worsen the conflict.
NAP also calls for community-managed low-voltage fences that are seasonal, meaning they are not permanent. Encircling around 5,600 kilometers of rural land across the country today are fences that give electric shocks of a maximum of 9,000 volts. They cost the government billions of rupees, with conservationists’ estimates running up to almost INR 1 million ($10,780) per kilometer, plus regular repair expenses. Then again, observers say there is a lack of management of the fences.
Elephant expert Fernando emphasizes that maintaining the fences is critical. Falling trees, for example, can damage them, making it easy for elephants to pass through. The renowned scientist notes, “Elephants are intelligent animals and the single male in particular has learned the art of avoiding injury, such as breaking the posts made from concrete or wood that do not emit strong electric shocks.”
Fernando is a leading opponent of the government’s elephant drives, which violently force elephants into narrow, uninhabited land spaces. His studies have exposed the overcrowding that results, causing starvation among the elephants due to the restricted area. Conflicts between the newcomers and local herds also arise. Says Fernando: “These measures have taught the elephant, gentle and adaptable by nature, to be aggressive, such as learning to raid farms.”
In fairness, officials have been under constant pressure to prioritize human activity, even as calls grow for better HEC mitigation and protection of Sri Lanka’s wild elephants. More importantly, the debate has raised public support for mitigation, propelling new community-based conservation initiatives.
Examples include bee fences and planting citrus trees. Proponents are counting on the buzzing of bees as well as the threat of their sting to deter elephants from getting too close. The giant beasts are also said to hate the smell of fruits like lemons and oranges. It’s still uncertain, however, whether these can be scaled up or work in other areas.
