Sri Lanka’s wild elephant population, set against its limited land area and spreading human settlements, presents a major challenge to conservation, Department of Wildlife Conservation Director General M.S.L.R.P. (Ranjan) Marasinghe has said.
Speaking on a television programme, Marasinghe put the wild elephant population at more than 7,000, and said the country holds the second-largest population of Asian elephants among range states after India — though differences in land area and geography make direct comparison difficult.
India’s land borders allow elephants to move across national frontiers, he said, while Sri Lanka’s island geography closes off that option. The density of elephants here is roughly ten times that of India.
Fragmentation, not just numbers
Marasinghe identified habitat fragmentation as a major driver of human-elephant conflict. Road networks, and the settlements that grow up along them, divide elephant habitat, cut traditional movement routes and push elephants and people into closer contact. Sri Lanka’s own high human population density, he added, further complicates any effort to protect habitat while meeting the needs of communities living beside it.
“Unless we take action to address human-elephant conflict itself, no amount of effort focused on individual animals will be enough to prevent these issues,” he said.
A comprehensive programme to address the conflict is being implemented, Marasinghe said, with conservation effort directed at protecting elephants in their natural environments. The aim, he said, was to move beyond reacting to incidents involving individual elephants and towards the wider environmental and human factors behind them.
Context
The figure is consistent with the Department’s own 2024 nationwide survey, which counted 7,451 wild elephants — up 26.7% from 5,879 in 2011.
The remarks come during a month in which this desk has covered a run of stories about named individual tuskers: the killing of Kavantissa, the presidential committee into his death, and the military search for the tusker Agbo. The Daily Mirror filing does not report Marasinghe referring to any of those cases, and no connection is asserted here beyond the timing.
Not reported
The report does not give the date of the survey behind the “more than 7,000” figure, name the television programme, or say what the comprehensive programme consists of, what it costs or when it began. It gives no annual figures for elephant or human deaths from the conflict, no comparison with previous years, and no detail of the density calculation underlying the ten-times comparison with India.
