Elephants - Census & Human-Wildlife Conflict

India's first genetic headcount of its wild elephants, released in October 2025, pegs the population at roughly 22,446 - anchoring a species for which the country holds more than three-fifths of the world's wild Asian elephants. Built on DNA drawn from dung rather than eye-counts, the SAIEE 2021-25 exercise deliberately resets the baseline, cautioning against reading a straight decline into the lower number. Sitting beside the count is a harder question of coexistence: a 2026 study from Assam finds that village squads sent to drive crop-raiding herds away were tied to two-to-three times more elephant deaths, most of them accidental.