With a hope that numbers of elephant in  India are increasing year after year, the their census has stared in most of the areas  today, 1^st. June 2012   and end on June 3. India is very  serious on animal conservation and  ensure  the elephant Census  once in every five years  by our Central Government.

In last one month,  lot of  training programmers were conducted at the different part of India , mainly at Forest offices and Nature Interpretation Centers. A round 15000 nos. enumerators given ground-level trainings by the officials of forest department.  Main train for the Forest Officers from different State was organised at New Delhi, in the Capital of India.  

The Elephant Census is being conducted in most of the  states and reserve forest under  leadership of Forest officials and  members of different NGOs are being involved  on their three-day mission.

This time no electronic gadgets would be used for the census and all care would be taken to avoid any duplicity of the count. The counting hour is 5am to 5pm in the daytime. The census will cover calves and adult elephants.

The Census is divided into three phases. In the first phase direct sighting of the pachyderms would be counted, the second one consisted of checking the transect line and surveying watering holes would be done in the third phase,  the forests were demarcated based on the density of the elephant population.

According to 2007 Census the Elephant population was observed  in Karnataka was around 5,600 to 5,900 ,  Jharkhand  had  624 tuskers. In Orissa 294 nos., Assam 5,246 elephants.

Nearly 3,000 surveyors — armed with notebooks, pencils and area maps — will fan out across all the 24 districts of  our Jharkhand state started from today to tally the dwindling population of Elephas maximus indicus or Indian elephant, which has been listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Many village youths have volunteered for the job, besides our forest employees and members of local village development committees. They have been taught correct ways to count elephants, including techniques to identify age and sex. Kits — comprising food, water, notebook, area map, pencils, clipboards and a compass — were distributed among surveyors yesterday.

We are waiting for the final results.