Opinion Elephant census: DNA-based census is a step forward in wildlife monitoring
Clarity must lead to course correction in conservation.

India’s latest elephant population estimate, the Synchronous All India Elephant Estimation (SAIEE) 2021-25, released last week, paints a sobering picture. It places the country’s wild Asian elephant numbers at 22,446, a notable drop from the 27,312 reported in 2017. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has clarified that the new figure marks a methodological reset — a “fresh baseline” rather than a figure directly comparable with previous counts. The Western Ghats and the Northeast remain key elephant strongholds, with Karnataka, Assam and Kerala home to some of the densest populations. But the methodological shift notwithstanding, the drop in estimated elephant population stands at 17.8 per cent, with the steepest declines recorded in the Northeast, in central India and in the Eastern Ghats regions. Jharkhand and Odisha have seen a 68 per cent and 54 per cent decline respectively vis-a-vis the 2017 estimate. This renews concerns over long-standing threats to elephant habitats and movement corridors.
Despite the troubling numbers, however, the report marks a scientific step forward. The shift to genetic mark–recapture methods, modelled on the robust tiger census framework, is a welcome correction in India’s wildlife monitoring. Instead of relying on direct counts, waterhole observations or dung-decay rates alone, the new method incorporates spatially structured sampling grids and genetic analysis of dung samples, enabling researchers to identify individual elephants with far greater precision. This marks an important evolution in wildlife monitoring. While tigers can be individually identified through their stripes, elephants pose a more complex challenge. DNA analysis helps overcome this, lending both scientific robustness to the process and room for more accurate long-term tracking of population trends and habitat use, vital for a species that roams vast and varied landscapes.
This is also what makes the uncomfortable pattern thrown up by the census of particular concern: Pachyderms are increasingly being imperilled by the human appetite for infrastructure, combined with an institutional indifference to its ecological costs. The Asian elephant, listed as “endangered” on the IUCN Red List, faces mounting threats from accelerating habitat fragmentation and changes in land-use patterns. India is home to over 60 per cent of the world’s Asian elephants, making its conservation policies globally consequential. But pressure on forest land from mining, power projects, railways, highways and agriculture continues to chip away at the animal’s traditional habitat and migratory routes. As herds are forced into unfamiliar terrain, conflicts with humans escalate, increasingly with fatal consequences. Conservation must urgently integrate elephant movement and safety with the blueprint of development. This includes securing corridors, enforcing ecological safeguards in project clearances, and strengthening human-animal conflict mitigation measures at the grassroots. The clarity offered by the census must form the basis of meaningful course correction.