Contribute your mite to conserve elephants

BANGALORE: The State Forest Department has geared up to create awareness and take the environment ministry's campaign "Haathi Mere Saathi" forward. The forest department plans to involve people for elephant conservation."In order to sensitise people for the cause we will now be conducting seminars for students and create awareness programme among communities," said Swaminath M H, additional principle chief conservator of forests (Wildlife). "Number of elephants have remained the same but there is increasing pressure on the elephant habitat which is a serious concern. Besides we are working on securing elephant corridors to decrease man-animal conflict in the state," he added.Elephants are India's national heritage and is home to over 27,000 Asiatic elephants spread across 88 elephant corridors in the country. Swaminath said, "With a total elephant population of 6,000 spread across the state, Karnataka ranks second among the highly elephant populated states next to Assam."The nation wide campaign was launched during the Elephant-8 ministerial meeting held at New Delhi in partnership with the Wildlife Trust of India(WTI). The delegates represented twothird of the world's wild elephant population. It was decided that later in 2013 all the 50 elephant range countries would meet up to deliberate and actively cooperate for elephant conservation and welfare.