Bengaluru: It is now confirmed: fungal toxins in the standing kodo millet crop that elephants ate, near Madhya Pradesh’s Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, are what killed 10 of them last week. The detailed toxicology report released by the ICAR-Indian Veterinary Research Institute, Bareilly, on the evening of November 5 that was accessed by The Wire shows that the stomach contents of the dead elephants had very high levels of cyclopiazonic acid – a toxin produced by fungi known to affect the crop.
The IVRI, which also tested for the presence of a wide range of insecticides but did not find any in the dead elephants’ stomach samples, found that all samples contained more than 100 parts per billion of cyclopiazonic acid that suggests that the elephants “might have consumed large quantity of kodo plant/grains”. The report recommends that fungus-infected kodo crops in the area be surveyed and destroyed so that it does not affect domestic or other wild animals.
While it is a concern that mycotoxins in the standing kodo millet crop killed 10 elephants in the Reserve, this is very rare and not really new: there has been a record of 14 elephants dying after consuming kodo millets in the 1930s in Tamil Nadu, wildlife biologists told The Wire. And there are worse things than kodo millets killing elephants across the country. Madhya Pradesh, for instance, got its first resident elephants in more than three decades because mining and deforestation may have pushed them from the adjacent states of Chhattisgarh and Odisha, experts told The Wire. Solutions to conserving elephants in the region, therefore, would need a landscape-centric approach which also includes raising awareness among local communities and farmers in Madhya Pradesh about how to live with elephants now that the animals are here to stay in the state, they said.
Ten elephants die in Bandhavgarh
On October 29, the staff of Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh were in for a rude shock. Four elephants lay dead at Sankhani and Bakeli in Khitoli range within the Reserve; six others were found unwell. The next day, despite treatment, four more elephants died; followed by two more on October 31. The elephants’ post-mortems were even more shocking: all dead elephants had large quantities of kodo millets in their stomachs, news reports quoted officials as saying. This pointed to toxins in the kodo crops that could have turned fatal for the elephants; however, detailed toxicology reports would be required to confirm this, officials added. Samples of the elephants’ stomach contents were then sent to laboratories including the ICAR-Indian Veterinary Research Institute at Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, for analyses.
Meanwhile, the chief minister announced after an emergency meeting he had called for on Sunday, November 3, that the state would take several measures including putting together an Elephant Task Force, and also radio-collaring elephants to understand their movements within the state. The state government put together a special investigation team to probe into the incident; on November 4, the government also suspended the Field Director of Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, and an Assistant Conservator of Forests for “negligence” in performing their duties and not keeping track of the movements of the elephant herd in the area. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change also roped in the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau to investigate the issue.
Laboratory tests conducted on the elephants’ stomach samples by the ICAR-Indian Veterinary Research Institute at Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, looked for different types of chemicals, including traces of different groups of commonly-used insecticides, and toxins produced by fungi that kodo millets are known to contain. Their results, published in the detailed toxicology report submitted to the government on the evening of November 5 confirmed that the samples did not contain any insecticides, heavy metals or other poisons. However, all samples contained more than 100 parts per billion of cyclopiazonic acid, a toxin produced by fungi such as Aspergillus and Penicillium, that has been found in kodo grains previously. Per the report, which The Wire accessed: “The results indicate that the elephants might have consumed large quantity of Kodo plant/grains.”
The report recommends that fungus-infected kodo crops in the area be surveyed and destroyed so that it does not affect domestic or other wild animals, and that farmers and livestock owners around the Tiger Reserve be made aware of the issue. It also added that a detailed study will need to be conducted to understand the dose of cyclopiazonic acid that is lethal to domestic and wild animals.
The Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) has also shared the ICAR-IVRI report with the Additional Chief Secretaries of the Farmer Welfare and Agriculture Development Department, the Directorate of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, the administrative heads of the districts of Shahdol, Katni, Umaria, Sidhi and Anuppur in the state for appropriate action. However this may be already late: on November 5, a local source based at Bandhavgarh who did not want to be named told The Wire that around 20 cattle in two villages outside Bandhavgarh had already fallen sick after consuming kodo millets.
The IVRI report, however, rules out the possibility of foul play, and lays to rest allegations leveled by the Congress of the currently BJP-run state government that the deaths were deliberate “poisonings”. State Congress president Jitu Patwari had alleged that the deaths of the 10 elephants were “not an accident”, while former Chief Minister of the state and senior Congress leader Kamal Nath had called for a CBI or judicial inquiry into the deaths of the elephants.
Millets and Malona, delirium and deaths
The ability of millets – small-seeded grass species – to grow well in areas that have limited water resources, across a variety of soil types and across vastly different terrains make them an ideal crop for farmers especially along forest fringes in many parts of India. For instance, a 2019 study that looked at historical references to interactions between people and elephants along a forest-agriculture border in what is now the Ranni forest division in southern Kerala quotes a poem by Kapilar, a Tamil poet of the famous Sangam period (dating back from the third century BCE to the third century CE), as noting how people in the area would sit guard at night over their millet fields to protect them from bull elephants at that time. Clearly, elephants are not strangers to raiding millet fields.
But huge expanses of rich food for the taking come with risks. Elephants have to swallow as much grain as they can in a short time before people guarding their crops shoo them away. But more importantly, some millet varieties contain aflatoxins and alkaloids – poisons produced by some species of moulds that grow in millet grains – that are known to be toxic to animals including cattle and monkeys. Kodo millets – commonly referred to as bajra – an ancient grain that Indians have cultivated for at least 3,000 years, per some estimates, also sometimes develop moulds that produce a mycotoxin called cyclopiazonic acid. Such infected kodo grains can affect the health of people who consume it too. Symptoms in people include vomiting, giddiness, unconsciousness, a rapid pulse, cold extremities, and tremors. Kodo poisoning even has a name: malona, the people of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh call it, according to references cited by a study published in 2021. Many studies including this one also mention that kodo millets ‘turn poisonous’ after prolonged rains, when the maturing and harvesting of kodo grains coincide with rainfall because moisture aids the growth of fungi and moulds.
“Farmers believe that kodo millet is poisonous after a rain. It is known to produce unconsciousness or delirium with violent tremors of the voluntary muscles. There are reports that elephants have died from eating kodo millet…To prevent poisoning, the grains are carefully removed from the glume, lemma and palea before cooking,” a 1983 study that looked at the diversity of kodo millets in India noted.
And there has been a precedent of elephants dying after consuming kodo millets, Aritra Kshettry, National Lead for Elephant Conservation, WWF-India, told The Wire. A communication in the Journal of Bombay Natural History Society talked of how a British forester reported 14 elephant deaths – all belonging to the same herd – from Tamil Nadu in the 1930s, due to ingestion of kodo millet, he said.
The Wire accessed the paper that Kshettry referred to. The ‘Miscellaneous Note’, published in the Journal by R.C. Morris dated May 22, 1934, noted how the Chief Conservator of Forests of Madras had informed him that villagers near Vannathiparai Reserve Forest (in Theni district in Tamil Nadu, near the Kerala border) had spotted 14 elephants dying there. Morris reported that a subsequent “chemical examination” showed that the elephants had died from kodo millet poisoning, and that a similar incident had occurred a few years ago in the same area.
“When this grain is in a poisonous condition it is apparently known as ‘Kiruku Varagu’ [Mad Kodo]”, the note by Morris read.
Kshettry also added that he had heard of reports of an incident of an elephant dying in Chhattisgarh a few years ago; a post mortem revealed its stomach contents as containing kodo millet. However, because it was a one-off incident, it may have been categorized as a natural death, he said.
A researcher who has been working in the Bandhavgarh landscape for more than two years noted that Bandhavgarh and its vicinities have witnessed an unusually prolonged monsoon this year. The researcher, who did not want to be named as they work with the state forest department, said that this could explain why the kodo crop may have turned out to be fatal for the 10 elephants that died in the Tiger Reserve, as the grains may have accumulated a lot of moisture during this time.
“Unseasonal weather events, which can be expected to become more common in the era of climate change, may increase the chances of such occurrences [as the recent deaths in Bandhavgarh],” wrote elephant scientist Raman Sukumar who is the National Science Chair, Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, and T.S. Suryanarayanan, Director, Vivekananda Institute of Tropical Mycology, Ramakrishna Mission Vidyapeeth, Chennai, in a commentary on Down to Earth on November 5.
Bigger threats: Mining, deforestation, persecution
While the deaths of 10 elephants in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve are indeed a concern and have elicited immediate and much-needed action from the administration, there are worse things than kodo millets that kill elephants. Such as people, and disturbances caused by people. For instance, the union environment ministry submitted in a response to the Lok Sabha in July this year that as many as 528 elephants had died in the country over the last five years due to “unnatural causes” including poaching, poisoning, train accidents and electrocution.
Live wires claim elephant lives all year through, and across most habitats in India that elephants dwell in. While farmers are permitted to use mild shocks through methods such as solar fences to deter elephants, high voltage wires that are fatal for both peoples and pachyderms are not permitted. But that’s a rule that people often flout. As per data submitted by the union government in the Lok Sabha in July this year, 71 elephants died due to electrocution in Odisha, 55 died due to the same reason in Assam, as did 52 in Karnataka and 49 elephants in Tamil Nadu. As recently as November 4, the Chhattisgarh High Court initiated a suo motu petition taking cognizance of news articles that reported that three elephants were electrocuted to death in the state’s Chuhkimar forest division last week. As per a report by the Indian Express that quoted petitioners in a court case, 21 elephants have died in Chhattisgarh alone between 2022 and 2024.
In fact, both persecution and human-caused disturbances such as mining in adjoining states gave Madhya Pradesh its very own resident elephant herds since 2018, several wildlife biologists told The Wire.
One biologist who did not want to be named as they work closely with state forest departments and feared retribution in the form of both persecution and withholding of research permits said that the persecution of elephants by people in Jharkhand and southern West Bengal in the form of hulla parties had driven several herds into Odisha. From here, many elephants moved into Madhya Pradesh via the forests of Chhattisgarh – or whatever currently remains of them.
For in Chhattisgarh the elephants could not remain. The once-contiguous forests here are now patchy, as people have logged trees in huge numbers for developmental projects including mining. And forests in the state continue to disappear. Even a 2023 study that looked at data published by the Forest Survey of India (scientists have repeatedly raised several concerns about their methodology in mapping India’s forest cover) found a telling decrease in forest area in Chhattisgarh between 2001 and 2019. The study attributed the decrease in forest cover to encroachment, degradation of forest, mining, felling, and diversion of land for irrigation. Another recent study that looked at satellite imagery from 1990 to 2020 found that the districts of Korba and Raigarh in the state witnessed an expansion in coal mines, built-up areas, and water bodies, while forest areas decreased by 711.3 sq km and 212.87 sq km respectively. The district of Sarguja too witnessed coal mine and built-up area expansion, along with a decline in forest cover of 160.21 sq km till 2010, per the study. This is one of the districts where the Hasdeo Bachao Andolan or the Save Hasdeo Movement, is still going strong, with local communities fighting the take-over of their forests by the Adani Group who have been awarded coal mining permits in the region by the union government.
Locals protest against tree felling in Hasdeo, Chhattisgarh. Photo: By arrangement
In fact, the elephants’ movement into Madhya Pradesh from Chhattisgarh is primarily caused by disturbances such as mining and the resulting deforestation that has fragmented the forests in Chattisgarh, said Kshettry. He said that elephants had been hunted out by the early 1900s in Madhya Pradesh and the state did not have elephants for several decades. However, the animals began migrating back into the area after the 1980s from Odisha and Jharkhand. So Madhya Pradesh – where around 40 elephants are now resident – will need to develop a landscape-level conservation plan that also raises awareness among people on how to live with elephants because the animals are now here to stay, he added.
For as interactions between elephants and people increase in the state, instances of crop raiding by elephants have increased, as have human deaths. On November 2, just a couple of days after the elephants died in Bandhavgarh due to kodo poisoning, two people died and one person was injured in the same district after interactions with elephants. On November 3, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Mohan Yadav announced that the state government would erect solar fences around farms to decrease human-elephant conflict in the state. The state government is also working with non-governmental organisations that have expertise in dealing with negative human-elephant interactions.
“The Wildlife Trust of India has been assisting the Forest Department at a landscape level to address the issues of human wildlife conflict, corridor securement and strengthening management capacity,” said Milind Pariwakam, Joint Director, Wildlife Trust of India. Our emphasis is on the landscape outside the PA network where the threats are higher…we are also assisting the forest department in training and capacity building of Primary Response Teams and also in building awareness among the villagers to reduce conflict.” The organisation is also working with the community to understand human practices that contribute to conflict and other drivers of conflict as well, including conducting surveys to identify the threats in the corridor and the bottleneck areas to help plan site specific solutions, Pariwakam added.
For now, forest staff at Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve have already burnt the standing kodo millet crop that the elephants ate. On November 4, CM Yadav also said that he would discuss with the Chattisgarh CM about the challenges arising due to herds of elephants entering Madhya Pradesh via Chhattisgarh, as well as better coordination between the two states to tackle the issue.
