The Wildlife Society of Orissa (WSO) has objected to the grant of environmental clearance to set up a common hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal plant at Patarpada village under Parjang block in an elephant habitat of Dhenkanal district.
The WSO has sent the objections on September 4 to the district Collector, SEIAA Chairman, OSPCB Chairman and IDCO CMD citing reasons on how the plant would impact in a high elephant conflict zone. The Summary Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has grossly ignored the impact of the project on endangered elephants expected resultant escalation in human elephant conflict once the project is commissioned. The EIA has a material omission by failing to mention the presence of a Scheduled I species (Asiatic Elephant) in the project site and adjacent landscape, the omission is despite the fact that there are about 25 resident elephants living in adjacent Barabanka Reserve Forest (RF) and about 100 to 125 elephants congregate in the same forest every year during crop season, said the WSO in its petition. The Barbanka RF is their year round shelter and is spread over 14 square kms elephants regularly emerge from here and move around for food, drink and bath in the Brahmans river located about one km away.
Patarpada under Mahabirod Forest Range spread over 25 square km has recorded large numbers of human-elephant encounters and crop depredation in the recent past.
In the last five years, there were 55 instances of such encounters reported, in which 26 humans lost their lives and 44 were injured.
During the period, 12 elephants were killed in the area. Strangely, these incidents have not been mentioned in the EIA report, said WSO secretary Biswajit Mohanty.
Mohanty said that as the human-elephant conflict peaked, the villagers in and around Patarpada pooled money from 900 families and constructed a 14-km-long solar-powered fence to protect about 1,250 acres of farmlands from elephant raids.
The Forest Department also constructed a six-km-long solar-powered fence around Barabanka RF and additionally about nine km of solar-power fence from the Parjang ITI to Mandiabolo to provide protection to farmlands of neighbouring Kandarsingha village.
Such mitigation measures by the Forest Department and local stakeholders have managed to reduce the human-elephant conflict to some extent. However, setting up the waste management plant is a sure shot recipe to escalate the conflict once again to unbearable and tragic limits in which severe losses of human lives and property are apprehended.
The summary EIA suggests that hazardous waste will be collected from 12 different districts of western Odisha such as Jharsuguda, Sundargarh, Bargarh, Balangir, Sambalpur, Angul, Keonjhar and Deogarh, etc.
This would mean a continuous flow of heavy transport vehicles, more so during nights when elephants move out of forests to feed.
The heavy vehicular movement would disturb their free movement and compel them to enter other areas giving rise to more human-elephant conflicts, Mohanty stated.
