Bhubaneswar, Mar 11: On Friday, a regional workshop was organized by the State Forest and Environment Department for synchronized elephant population census to estimate the number of pachyderms across the Eastern region States, here. Senior forest officials from all states of the eastern zone participated in the two-day workshop. The task of counting the number of elephants scheduled to happen between May 9 and 12 will cover Eastern region states, comprising Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and West Bengal. At the workshop, adopting both direct and indirect sighting of elephants across different states in the eastern region was discussed. This census will help determine accurate distribution of elephants. With this, the growth rate or the decline rate of the population for the next 20 years can be studied. It will also help in understanding the demography of elephants in the wild. Whether elephant habitats undergo changes due to human intervention, the male-female ratio and other related information will be obtained through the census. All the forest officials were sensitized on elephant census through books.
Notably, in the last census conducted in 2015, the population of elephants in Odisha stood at 1954. This included adult males, females, calves and sub-adult animals.
