A 17-year-old girl was killed in an elephant attack in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, local media reported.
The girl, identified by only her first name Pooja, had nearly reached her home in Kodagu district’s Bettathuru village when a wild elephant charged at her from behind at around 5.30pm local time on 28 February.
She died at the scene, the Indian Express reported. Her family said the attack was sudden.
It wasn’t a one-off incident. Figures from Karnataka’s forest department show a persistent pattern of human-wildlife conflict in the state. In the past five years, at least 254 people have been killed in attacks by wild animals, 42 of them in 2024-25 alone.
About 70 per cent of the fatalities were caused by tigers, elephants and leopards, species whose habitats increasingly overlap with expanding villages, farmlands and infrastructure, intensifying encounters at the edges of forested areas.
On Saturday, Pooja’s mother, Devaki, heard her daughter’s screams and rushed out in panic, but there was no time to intervene, the newspaper reported.
Her father, Girish, had stepped away momentarily to park his motorcycle. When he returned, he found his daughter dead.
Pooja’s body was taken to a local government hospital where a postmortem examination was done.
News of the teenager’s killing sparked anger and grief in the area. On Sunday, villagers, members of farmer organisations and workers from the Bharatiya Janata Party staged protests. They blocked the Mysuru-Bantwal stretch of the nearby national highway for over two hours, causing traffic to pile up for several kilometres as they demanded urgent action from authorities to prevent further attacks.
The Karnataka government later announced a compensation of Rs 20 lakh for the victim’s family.
Incidents of human-wildlife conflict are often reported from areas along the forested tri-junction of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala states where elephant corridors intersect with expanding human settlements. Animal attacks are also fairly common in eastern India.
In early January, a lone male elephant in the eastern state of Jharkhand killed at least 20 people over nine days in the forested West Singhbhum district before disappearing into the jungle.
The attacks, which took place between 1 and 9 January in the Chaibasa and Kolhan areas of the Saranda forest belt, mostly happened at night near forest fringes where villagers were guarding crops.
Jharkhand has recorded nearly 1,300 deaths in elephant attacks over the past 23 years, according to a recent study by the Wildlife Institute of India.
In October last year, India’s wild elephant population was estimated at 22,446, down from 27,312 in 2017.
