The last elephant of Dampa

“One jab of its tusk destroyed seven bags of harvest.”

A year has passed but Rampara has not forgotten the damage caused by the lone elephant in his home in village Damparengpui.

Seven bags of produce equal five tin containers of mustard, which is about 10-12 kilos. Here in Mizoram, tin cans are traditionally referenced to measure scale or weight of bags used to store food.

“The mustard is bad now, after the elephant licked it,” he adds. The elephant also destroyed the paddy stored inside his bamboo watch shed with a mere thrust of its tongue.

But the 73-year-old Rampara is a forgiving sort. “The mayung [elephant] is good. It never attacks humans. At most, it destroys crops. It comes for food and goes away.” A farmer and bamboo handicrafts artisan, Rampara belongs to the Reang (also spelled as Riang) tribal community.

He goes on to tell PARI that the elephant is shy. “Whenever it hears a human sound, it hangs its long ears low.” And its visits to farms have decreased – from three or four raids in 2022 and 2023, to twice in 2024 and only once in 2025.

For more than a decade, this elephant has been pacing the boundaries between the forest, village and farmland. Always alone. Unlike other parts of India where the elephant (Elephas maximus) roams in herds with matriarchs and children moving together, closely bonded, Dampa’s elephant is a lone ranger in Mizoram’s Mamit district which houses the Dampa Tiger Reserve, the largest wildlife sanctuary in the state. The reserve is on the cusp of being a potential last refuge in Mizoram for the 16 pachyderms that live here. A fraction of India’s 22,446 elephants.

“In a year, I spot the [lone] elephant twice. [It is] like watching the child of the mother who was under my care for a long time,” says Nondia, a former mahout from the Reang community.

The elephant wasn’t always solitary. Three decades ago, roughly 25 elephants roamed here—only one domestic, the rest wild. According to Nondia some migrated into Bangladesh. Hunters killed others.

Forest officials arranged for the mother to breed with a domestic male elephant from Assam. She gave birth to twins – a male and a female, but died in labor in 2006, says Nondia. The male calf didn't survive. The father died within a year.

“One child continues to play in the jungle,” Nondia says, referring to the lone pachyderm of Mamit district.

Elephant sightings near jhum farms, rivulets, and traditional crossing points have been reported most frequently in Damparengpui and Teirei.

In Damparengpui, farmer Kawla’s crops have been damaged by pachyderms. The 53-year-old survives on shifting cultivation and daily wage labour, earning 400 to 500 rupees a day.

In 2025, the elephant trampled the bamboo watch shed on his two-hectare farm at Mawbua, seven kilometers from his village, destroying 15 bags of harvest — paddy, chilli, mustard, pumpkin and brinjal.

“It costs 15,000 rupees and takes about three months to reconstruct the watch shed,” says Kawla, who has six children. “Every rupee comes out of our pocket, no compensation. I cannot afford labour costs, so I offer workers two tins of rice instead.”

He applied for compensation in 2010 and again in 2025. Both claims were rejected.

“I try to save whatever I can, but I don't know how long it will last,” says Kawla, while tending to the small kitchen in one corner of his wooden home.

And Rampara thinks, “bloung bai mnusu tongmo jaga le mayung rao pho khakhom khe ye tongmai mo jaga ong mai uano hing ye ma choung uo [We think both the forest and the people have become a safe space for the elephant].”

Most of the residents here belong to the Reang and Mizo tribes and speak Mizo and Kau Bru. Their main source of livelihood is shifting agriculture or jhum cultivation. Elephants, even a lone one, can cause irreparable damage to harvest and homes.

The reserve is home to a large number of clouded leopards (Neofelis nebusa), eight of India’s 15 primate species such as the Phayre’s leaf monkey (Trachypithecus phayrei) and hoolock gibbons (Genus hoolock). Malayan sun bears (Helarctos malayanus) forage in the understorey. The tiger (Panthera tigris) and marbled and Asiatic golden wild cats (Pardofelis marmorata and Catopuma temminckii), stalk the shadows.

Nondia’s relationship with the lone elephant goes back a long way. The 63-year-old worked as mahout to this elephant's mother for two decades, starting in 1987. She was a domestic elephant brought from Assam. “Whenever I see the elephant, it brings a rush of emotions inside me. I feel happy,” Nondia says, referring to the lone pachyderm. Next to him, Hamoiti, his wife smiles when he talks about the domestic elephant he doted on. We are seated inside their traditional Bru stilt house, the room darkened by bed sheets hung as makeshift curtains.

Believing the orphaned female calf is seeking a male partner to mate, Nondia worries when she grows restless and travels far, sometimes appearing near the Mizoram-Tripura border at a teak plantation. This is a risky area.

Three domestic elephants from Assam already work the teak logging operations there, and forest officials fear the teak mafia may capture the wild female. When she ventures too close, they send people to steer her away.

Lalhmelthaa, 45, has been a beat officer at Dampa's Teirei for 10 years. and says there were talks of breeding the elephant.

“There is no doubt that staying alone in the wild is stressful for the female elephant in Dampa. If the department could arrange for an elephant to mate with it—not that it takes too much money, elephants would be saved from getting locally extinct,” says Anwaruddin Choudhury, a wildlife specialist who has studied the decline in elephant population in Mizoram.

A study in 2001 pointed out that traditionally elephants were hunted and its meat consumed by local tribes including the Mizo, Lai, Mara, Bru, Chakma and Hmar.

Titled, ‘The Wild Elephant Elephas Maximus in Mizoram’, it points to a rise in insurgency and modern firearms in the 1960s led to a "phenomenal increase" in poaching. Extremists killed elephants not only for meat but also for ivory, which was sold in Southeast Asian markets to fund weapons purchases.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the remaining elephants were isolated in small, disconnected pockets in western and southern areas, including Dampa Sanctuary and Ngengpui Wildlife Sanctuary. This severe fragmentation left the remaining herds with "no future" due to habitat loss and the threat of inbreeding.

“The biggest animal in Dampa is the elephant. As it is very difficult to spot any animal in the dense, rugged forest on steep hillsides, elephants are relatively easier to see, even if not frequent,” says Lalhmelthaa. “Whenever I see the elephant, I feel it should be given a chance to breed, to have a family of her own instead of being alone,” Lalhmelthaa, who belongs to the Reang tribal community, adds. But he acknowledges a competing concern: “There are worries too that if the population of the elephant increases, forest staff like us may be prone to more attacks.”

“I have seen the animal 50-60 times,” says S. Samuel in a nonchalant manner. He is sitting outside a building a few paces from the Dampa Forest Inspection Bungalow, in the midst of shops selling SIM cards and snacks. The 50-year-old resident of Teirei can easily pinpoint where the animal is likely to appear.

Forest guards in Dampa are mostly hired on contract, tasked with creating checklists of animals spotted during routine patrols. “When we tick the animals off our checklist, it feels like an achievement,” Samuel, who belongs to the Mizo tribal community, says.

The elephant also visits his two-hectare farm at Luihnar, two to three kilometers upstream of the Teirei River, during harvest season. Samuel plants multiple crops in rotation—paddy, corn, pumpkin, mustard, taro, stinky bean, carrot, cabbage and brinjal—throughout the year.

“It has never attacked any human, but you can never tell,” he says. “It comes close to the watching shed at the anti-poaching camp, searching for food. The sai [elephant] tries to be sneaky, but the cracking and snapping of stalks when it pushes through the bamboo is a giveaway.”

Samuel has hardened himself against the economic crop losses from the elephant and sambar deer. Each year, at least 25 percent of his harvest is lost to such raids. He has seven children, and two daughters working in Aizawl send money home to help support the family.

He hasn’t filed a compensation claim in 10 years. Wading through bureaucratic processes only to receive 400 to 500 rupees for massive crop losses isn't worth it, he says, and adds, “even when the claims were approved, the payouts were scarce. Sometimes nothing at all.”

"I earn 1.5 lakh [rupees] during the vegetable-selling season, October to March,” Samuel continues. “There is a loss of one lakh [rupees] during crop raids—50 per cent. If my crops were secured from the elephant, I could earn a lakh more.”

Sometimes Samuel wishes the forest department would help find the elephant a mate deep in the forest, so it would stop venturing out to destroy his farm. When he worked as a forest guard from 1993–2018, and there were more elephants, conflicts with humans were less frequent.

“One may think we are hurt by the economic losses and that the elephant's death may benefit us," he says. “But the truth is, the forest department is corrupt. If they gave a fair price for crop damage, we could somehow learn to live with the losses and manage household expenses.”

Rampara thinks that without a mate for this elephant and in the absence of a fail-safe breeding plan, the community's connection to the creature will be lost forever when it dies.

“Mnusu rao mang le pal kmam yag ye ma tong yag ya. Bloung ni taumung tauja rao pho kmam yag uo. Mayung kthang chini buskang tongmo le betha jala khe ye naithao yag ye no chung ma tong uo [“Male or female elephant, it feels like the elephant has been roaming the forest searching for a partner. It’s not just humans who may feel lonely. Animals feel that too].”

The reporter would like to thank Rodingliana and Lalvohbika, for their help with translations and inputs for this story.

This story is supported by the Shashank Srinivasan-PARI Fellowship 2025