The Ministry of Environment has completed the recruitment of 1,500 officers to protect Sri Lanka’s electric elephant fences, alongside the deployment of 5,000 Civil Security Department (CSD) personnel for the same purpose, Minister of Environment Dr. Dhammika Patabendi said.

Patabendi told NewsFirst the initiative is intended to strengthen the maintenance and protection of the electric fencing infrastructure used to keep wild elephants away from villages, cultivations and homesteads — the core mitigation tool in Sri Lanka’s long-running human-elephant conflict. He said the new fence-protection force will work alongside the CSD detachment to ensure damaged fences are repaired promptly and that illegal tampering of energiser circuits is detected and reported faster than in the past.

The Minister added that the recruitment of an additional 532 officers has already commenced to oversee and regulate the operations of the newly deployed personnel. The oversight tier is intended to address chronic gaps in coordination between Wildlife Department staff, provincial fence maintenance teams and rural police on the conflict’s hottest frontiers.

Sri Lanka recorded the highest wild elephant population in two decades — 7,451 animals — in the 2024 nationwide survey released earlier this month, against a backdrop of more than 400 elephant deaths and 170 human fatalities reported in 2023 alone. The Cabinet last week approved the drafting of a new National Action Plan for human-elephant conflict management, citing rapid land-use changes, fragmented wildlife corridors and economic pressures across 19 of 25 districts as the impetus for replacing the 2020 plan.

The fence-protection scale-up also follows a string of incidents involving illegally rigged farm-side fences, including the recent electrocution of two wild elephants — a cow and a calf — at Maligawila. Patabendi has separately framed a proposed Hambantota Elephant Management Reserve as an “urgent national necessity”, and the Cabinet has begun freeing three major elephant corridors at Wetahirakanda, Hadapanagala and Koholankala for unrestricted herd movement.

Source: 1,500 Officers Recruited To Protect Elephant Fences — NewsFirst, June 18.