Train kills 5 elephants after plowing into them in India

NEW DELHI — The night train to Silchar was moving fast — too fast, authorities say.

As it chugged into a forested area of northeastern India on Saturday night, a group of villagers waved their flashlights frantically, urging the driver to slow down. He didn’t know why, but he soon found out.

Ahead in the darkness, a large herd of elephants was ambling across the railway tracks. When the train driver finally saw what was in front of him, he hit the emergency brake, railway officials said, but it was too late.

The 14-car passenger train plowed right into the herd. Two calves and two adult elephants were killed instantly, and an adult elephant that was badly injured died Monday. Some local news reports said that several baby elephants had not even moved as the train approached and that adult elephants had sought to protect them by surrounding them.

Indian forestry officials said the warnings had been ignored for a simple reason: The train was running 10 minutes late.

“The driver was trying to cover up the time,” said P. Sivakumar, a senior forestry officer in northern Assam, the state where the accident happened. The incident is now under investigation.

In some parts of India, especially in the northeast, it is quite common for elephants to pass through populated regions or to step across railway tracks — or even four-lane highways — in search of food. Many areas have been designated elephant corridors, where drivers are supposed to proceed with caution.

In the case over the weekend, the train operator was traveling above the speed limit of 30 kph, or about 20 mph, forestry officials said. Earlier in the day, the Forestry Department had sent several urgent notifications to railway operators that a large elephant herd was moving through the Habaipur area, about 250 kilometers north of Silchar, near India’s border with Bangladesh. The area is deep green on most maps, and a wellknown refuge for elephants.

This episode is the latest in an unfortunate pattern. As recently as December, a train in Assam killed five adult elephants, including one that was pregnant.

But in India’s wildlife community, the latest accident seems to have reverberated more.

“The railways need to be held accountable,’’ said Prerna Singh Bindra, a conservationist and writer. “How come we have not learned our lessons?”

About two weeks ago, Bindra and more than a dozen other wildlife advocates sent a letter to India’s railway minister pointing out this very problem.

“Our elephants are in trouble,’’ the letter began. It then laid out several steps to help prevent train-elephant accidents, including building underpasses beneath railway lines for the animals.

Wildlife experts say that India has the largest number of train accidents involving elephants in the world, with hundreds killed in the past 20 years. Many accidents tend to involve one or two animals, though in late 2013, five elephants were killed by a train in the Indian state of West Bengal, another area where such collisions happen frequently.

The number of collisions with trains seems to be rising. In West Bengal, there were 27 such deaths from 1974-2002. But from 20042015, a much shorter period, there were 65, and there were as many as 30 killed in the last five years alone, according to Indian environmentalists.