Seven elephants die in India after passenger train collides with herd

Seven wild Asian elephants were killed and a calf was injured when a high-speed passenger train collided with a herd crossing the tracks in India’s northeastern state of Assam early Saturday, local authorities said.

The train driver saw the herd of about 100 elephants and used the emergency brakes, but the train still hit some of the animals, Indian Railways spokesman Kapinjal Kishore Sharma told The News.

Five train cars and the locomotive derailed after the impact, but there were no human casualties, Sharma said.

Veterinarians performed autopsies on the dead elephants, which were due to be buried later that day.

The crash site is a forested area about 78 miles southeast of Guwahati, the capital of Assam. Railway tracks in the state are frequented by elephants, but Indian Railways said in a statement that the accident site was not a designated elephant corridor. Trains passing through the country’s 150 wildlife corridors are ordered by the government to slow down to avoid collisions.

The Rajdhani Express train, traveling from Sairang in Mizoram state bordering Myanmar, was heading to the national capital of New Delhi with 650 passengers on board when it collided with elephants.

“We disconnected the coaches that did not derail and the train resumed its journey towards New Delhi. Around 200 passengers who were in the five derailed coaches were shifted to Guwahati in a different train,” Sharma said.

High-speed trains colliding with wild elephants are not uncommon in Assam, home to an estimated 7,000 wild Asian elephants, one of the highest concentrations of the pachyderm in India. Since 2020, at least a dozen elephants have been killed by high-speed trains across the state. According to data from the Indian government, an average of 20 elephants die in train accidents every year. Deaths often occur when elephants cross railroad tracks that run through their habitats.

The country recently opened a elephant hospital in Mathura. The southern state of Tamil Nadu also launched an artificial intelligence and machine learning-based surveillance system aimed at helping prevent elephant deaths on railways.

Wild elephants often enter human habitations at this time of year, when rice fields are ready for harvest.