As Nilambur gears up for a high-stakes by-election tomorrow, the issue dominating the minds of residents isn’t political slogans or campaign rhetoric, but a crisis that has loomed large for years — the intensifying conflict between humans and wild animals.
Located at the edge of Kerala’s forested heartland, the Nilambur assembly seat — part of the Wayanad parliamentary constituency — is surrounded by forest. With seven panchayats and one municipality sharing boundaries with dense woodland, residents say human-wildlife encounters have become an almost daily affair, particularly with elephants and wild boars.
About 15 kilometres from Nilambur town, in Edakkara panchayat, a farmer, Hussain, points to his devastated plantain field. On June 13, a wild elephant trampled the crops and tore down a newly-installed fence in the dead of night.
“The crisis is severe. Nobody is going near the forest area now,” Hussain says. “Apart from elephants, wild boars are also a concern. It recently hit my son who was travelling on a motorcycle. There is no use telling this to forest department officials. They will ask us to go to Akshaya Centre and give a request. We have to spend money on it. If someone dies, then the government will announce some amount as compensation and then there is no issue. That’s what they are doing now.”
He continues, “On the other side, if we do something to scare away these animals, that becomes an issue. You can see this area — at around 3 am, when people have slept, an elephant came and destroyed this field. We saw the destruction only when someone returning from work spotted it. The elephant came to our house, destroyed the plantain, and walked through the road and went back to the forest. Even the ripe ones have been damaged.”
For Sameera, Hussain’s neighbour and mother of two young children, the fear is more personal. Her family had only recently moved into the area and didn’t expect the danger to be so close.
“We didn’t know anything at night. We got to know when we woke up that the elephant just passed by our house,” she says. “Those who stayed here before had informed us that elephants have come here, but we didn’t think it would come this close. We are really scared as we hear news every day about people getting killed in wild animal attacks. My children are also scared.”
Just a kilometre away from Hussain’s home, a tribal family lives barely 100 metres from the forest, with only an electric fence for protection. As dusk falls, every rustle from the woods sends a wave of anxiety through the household.
Suresh, the head of the family, says wild boars are as much a problem as elephants. “Once it gets dark, we stay alert. The electric fence is there, but we don’t know when the animals might break through.”
The state has witnessed repeated protests over the issue, with many accusing the CPI(M)-led government of inaction. The government, however, blames legal limitations. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has defended the administration, claiming the state has repeatedly urged the Centre to declare wild boars as vermin — a move that would allow culling — but the Union Environment Ministry has rejected the request.
“Those blaming the state government are not ready to examine the facts — that it is the Central laws which are a major hurdle in dealing with the matter,” Vijayan said earlier this month.
But for residents, neither state nor Centre offers much reassurance. With no long-term solution in sight, the man-animal conflict is becoming more than a policy problem — it is turning into a decisive political issue.
The constituency will witness a triangular contest among Congress’s Aryadan Shoukath, CPI(M)’s M Swaraj, and former MLA and Trinamool Congress-backed PV Anvar, but for the people on the forest’s edge, the real battle is not between political rivals — it’s between survival and the wild.