The extensive efforts of conservation do carry a cost of human-animal conflicts, especially to the human population residing in the close proximity of the wildlife. The Asiatic Elephant (Elephas maximus) populations are in a constant zone of conflict throughout their range of inhibition and such conflicts threaten and further weaken their survival aspects. The elephant migration in Maharashtra, India started two decades ago when the first documented herd entered the state through the forest passage south of the Kolhapur district. Since then it has resulted in a sudden spike in crop raids, human-elephant encounters and conflicts in the given area as the human communities exhibited no previous experience of tackling an elephant inhabited ecosystem. In this research, we evaluated the total crop damage by the elephants in the affected area for the years 2020-2022. On field surveys, interviews of the local communities, interaction with forest department and elephant tracking were performed for gathering data. The brief feeding behaviour by the elephant populations, the impact and correlation of the humans and elephants on different socio-ecological factors, the pervasive conflict created due to the constant encounters, the perception of this entire conflict by the local human communities and the holistic mitigation measures necessary to dissolve the conflict were inferred from the above study. These results further help in deploying environment centric policy for the conservation of these giants.
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