Wildlife · Long read · 15 min read

Arikkomban: The True Story of the Rice Tusker of Chinnakanal

An orphaned calf who grew up alone near the Anayirangal reservoir. A tusker who learned that rice lived behind tin walls. A court battle that reached the Supreme Court, two captures, two states, and a new life 300 km from home. The facts behind Kerala's most famous wild elephant, from his childhood to the day he was shifted for the last time.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

Few wild animals in India have been loved, feared, blamed and defended as fiercely as one elephant from the hills near Munnar. To the people of Chinnakanal and Santhanpara he was Arikkomban, the "rice tusker" (from the Malayalam ari, rice, and komban, tusker; the name is also spelt Arikomban, and in Tamil Nadu he was called Arisi Komban). For years he broke into ration shops, estate canteens and kitchens to eat rice. In 2023 he became the subject of High Court and Supreme Court hearings, a forest operation involving hundreds of people, protests in two states, social-media fan clubs and, eventually, two captures and two journeys into exile.

This article tries to tell his story as accurately and fairly as possible, using court records, forest department statements and newspaper reports in Malayalam, Tamil and English. Where the facts are uncertain or disputed, we say so.

A calf and his mother

The story of Arikkomban begins with a sick mother. According to an estate watcher interviewed by the science journalist Aathira Perinchery for The Wire Science in 2023, people around Chinnakanal first noticed him in 1987, as a calf of about one year, with his mother, who had an injured leg. Forest staff and local tribal people treated her, but she died within about three months. The calf was left to grow up without his mother and without the family herd that normally raises a young elephant. Some newspaper reports have since called him an "orphaned calf".

How exactly he came to love rice is not known. Unverified stories circulate in Chinnakanal: that as a young calf he watched his mother suffer at people's hands, or that a burning tyre was once thrown at an elephant and her calf. There is no evidence for these stories, and we repeat them only because they are part of how the people of the area explain him. What scientists do say is that elephants have long memories, learn from experience, and remember a good source of food once they have found it. A young male growing up alone on the edge of human settlements had every chance to learn that sacks of rice lay behind thin walls.

If the 1987 account is correct, Arikkomban was about 36 years old in 2023: a mature tusker in the prime of life, with a stout build and relatively short tusks.

The land he grew up in

To understand Arikkomban, you have to understand Chinnakanal. The area lies in the northeastern hills of Idukki, between the tea estates around Suryanelli at higher altitudes and cardamom plantations under forest trees lower down. To the east lies the dense evergreen forest of Mathikettan Shola National Park on the border with Tamil Nadu.

In 1965 Kerala completed the Anayirangal dam on the Panniyar river, a tributary of the Periyar, flooding parts of Pooppara, Chinnakanal and Rajakumari. The name of the place itself means "where the elephants descend". The reservoir gave the elephants of the area a reliable source of water throughout the year, and the grasslands around it remained an important elephant habitat. Some of these grasslands were later planted with eucalyptus and acacia.

In 2001–02, the state government settled about 300 landless tribal families from other parts of Idukki on land in this area. Each family received an acre of land and a small house, and the settlement came to be known as 301 Colony. The Munnar Divisional Forest Officer of the time, Prakriti Srivastava, had advised against the settlement, warning that the land lay in an elephant corridor. The Kerala High Court later described the rehabilitation as "imprudent". Many of the families, unable to farm or live safely among elephants, eventually left; by 2023, only a small number remained.

Over the following two decades, the landscape changed further: more roads, more fences, more buildings, tourist camps and resorts. A small, resident population of elephants, estimated by the forest department at around 19 to 38 animals at different times, became increasingly hemmed in. It was in this changing landscape that Arikkomban grew up.

The rice tusker

By the 2010s, Arikkomban had become famous across the High Range for his raids. He broke into ration shops, the government fair-price shops that store subsidised rice, sugar and wheat for local families, as well as estate canteens, labour lines, houses and grocery shops, looking for rice, and sometimes jaggery and salt. One ration shop at the Panniyar estate was reported to have been broken into nine times in a single year. According to various reports, dozens of buildings were damaged over the years; one report put the figure at more than 60 houses and shops, and others higher.

For the families who lived there, this was not a joke or a news story. A tusker breaking down the wall of a house at night, with children inside, is terrifying. Shopkeepers lost stock. Estate workers lost the rice they had bought for the month. Many people in Chinnakanal and Santhanpara lived for years with the fear of hearing him at the door.

In 2017, the forest department made its first attempt to capture him. A team tracked him and hit him with tranquiliser darts, but he escaped.

Was he a killer? The disputed toll

The most serious charge against Arikkomban was that he had killed people. Here the facts are genuinely uncertain, and it is important to be careful.

• In the Supreme Court in April 2023, the Kerala government cited seven deaths and destroyed homes in arguing that the elephant should be captured and kept in captivity.
• Some residents and local representatives said he had killed more than ten, and some reports said twelve, over a period going back to about 2005.
• Others, including some forest officials, animal welfare activists and journalists, argued that these deaths were not proven to be his. Several other tuskers in the area, notably Chakkakomban and Murivalan, look similar, and it is very hard to identify an individual elephant at night. Some deaths in the area were attributed to Arikkomban only because he had been seen nearby, as in the case of a forest watcher trampled in January 2023.

No independent, published investigation has established exactly how many deaths Arikkomban caused, if any, in Kerala. What is certain is that people in the area did die in encounters with elephants, that their families grieved, and that the fear was real. The only death that was clearly and directly linked to him came later, in Tamil Nadu, and we describe it below.

2023: the case goes to court

In early 2023, after renewed raids and protests in Chinnakanal and Santhanpara, the Kerala government decided to capture Arikkomban and keep him permanently in captivity in a kraal (a wooden enclosure for training captive elephants) at the Kodanad elephant centre in Ernakulam district. He would be tamed and possibly trained as a kumki, a captive elephant used to drive away wild ones. The forest department brought in four kumki elephants, including one named Vikram, and prepared a bait of rice in a building at Chinnakanal that Arikkomban had broken into years earlier.

Animal welfare organisations went to the Kerala High Court. On 29 March 2023, a division bench rejected the government's plan to capture and confine him. It set up a five-member committee of experts and allowed tranquilising and radio-collaring only if he posed a threat. During the hearings, the court questioned how the state had come to settle people in an elephant habitat at all.

On 5 April 2023, following the expert committee's suggestion, the High Court ordered that Arikkomban be relocated to the Parambikulam Tiger Reserve in Palakkad district. People living near Parambikulam, in Nenmara, Muthalamada and the surrounding areas, protested strongly, saying that a "problem elephant" should not be sent to their doorstep. The state government appealed to the Supreme Court, which on 17 April 2023 declined to interfere, noting that the High Court had followed the experts' advice. A bench headed by Chief Justice D. Y. Chandrachud said the state could not override the expert committee.

With Parambikulam now politically impossible, the High Court allowed the expert committee and the forest department to choose another site and to keep it secret.

29 April 2023: Mission Arikkomban

The operation began before dawn on Saturday, 29 April 2023. About 150 people from the forest, police, health, motor vehicles and fire and rescue departments took part, with prohibitory orders imposed along the route. The team, led by the forest department's chief wildlife veterinarian, Dr Arun Zachariah, located the tusker near Cement Palam in Chinnakanal.

The first tranquiliser dart was fired just before noon, at 11:54 am. Reports differ on the total number of darts and booster doses, between five and seven. With the help of four kumki elephants, the sedated tusker was pushed into a specially prepared lorry in heavy rain at about 5:30 pm and fitted with a GPS radio collar. Officials noted some bruises and wounds on his body, but said he was in good health.

The convoy drove through the night. At Kumily, residents performed a puja for him at the entrance to the Mangala Devi temple at Thekkady, at the forest department's request. In the early hours of 30 April, at about 4 am, Arikkomban was released in the Medakanam area of the Periyar Tiger Reserve, more than 100 km by road from Chinnakanal, the only home he had ever known.

A wanderer in Tamil Nadu

The radio collar soon showed that Arikkomban was not settling down. Within days he crossed the border into Tamil Nadu and spent time in the forests and estates of Meghamalai in Theni district. In the early hours of one morning in May, he attacked a ration shop at Manalar estate, near Meghamalai, damaging its window, but left without getting any rice.

He moved back towards Periyar and, in late May, came close to Kumily. On the night of 25 May he was seen at Rosappookandam, about 100 m from houses, and was chased back into the forest. The next day his collar showed him moving in the direction of Chinnakanal.

On Saturday, 27 May 2023, he came down from the forest near Lower Camp and walked into the town of Cumbum, in Theni district. Frightened crowds ran in every direction. He damaged autorickshaws and two-wheelers. Three people were injured. One of them, an autorickshaw driver named Palraj (also reported as Balraj), was in his autorickshaw when the elephant attacked it; he fell while trying to escape and suffered a severe head injury. He died at the Theni Government Medical College Hospital on 30 May 2023. The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, M. K. Stalin, announced compensation for his family.

Prohibitory orders were imposed in Cumbum. An attempt to tranquilise the elephant failed when two men calling themselves YouTubers flew a drone over him, startling him into running away; they were later arrested by Tamil Nadu police.

5–6 June 2023: the last journey

The Tamil Nadu forest department, under Additional Chief Secretary Supriya Sahu, set up a control room in Cumbum and mobilised about 190 forest staff, 16 trackers and three kumki elephants, Suyambu, Muthu and Udhayan, from the Topslip and Mudumalai camps. Between about 3 and 4 am on 5 June 2023, near Poosanampatti in the Cumbum East range, Arikkomban was tranquilised with two darts and loaded onto a lorry.

A Kerala-based animal rights activist, Rebeca Joseph, petitioned the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court, arguing that the elephant was injured and should be treated and returned to Kerala. The court briefly stayed his release, then allowed it after the forest department assured it that his injuries, including a wound on his trunk, would be treated.

After an overnight journey of about 300 km in a specially fitted vehicle, Arikkomban was released on the morning of 6 June 2023 in dense forest near water in the upper reaches of Kodayar, in the Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve, on the border of Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli districts and Kerala. It was the last time he would be moved.

After the storm

In the months that followed, petitions continued. In July 2023 the Supreme Court dismissed a petition seeking a report on his health with costs of ₹25,000, the Chief Justice remarking that the court was "fed up" with the Arikkomban litigation. Petitions were also filed in the Kerala and Madras High Courts seeking his return to Kerala, but he was not brought back.

Tamil Nadu's forest department has reported several times that he is doing well. In July and August 2023, it said he had settled in the upper Kodayar area and had been seen with a herd of elephants. In February 2024, responding to social-media rumours that he had died, the field director of the Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve said he was healthy, that a deep wound on his trunk had been treated by veterinarians, that he was being monitored through his radio collar, and that he was foraging in the forest away from human settlements. We have not found any official report since then of him raiding a shop or a house in his new home.

In Chinnakanal, the ration shop raids stopped. But the conflict did not. Other elephants, including Chakkakomban and Murivalan, still live in the area, and people in the area have continued to lose their lives in encounters with wild elephants. As experts had warned, removing one elephant did not remove the causes of the conflict.

A celebrity elephant

Arikkomban became a phenomenon. Fan pages and social-media groups followed his every move. Statues of him were erected in Idukki. People signed petitions to "bring Arikkomban home". Videos of him resting or feeding went viral. A Malayalam film about him was announced in 2023, and a Tamil film titled Arikomban, "based on a true incident", is due for release in December 2026.

His fame cut both ways. For many in Chinnakanal, the outpouring of affection from people who had never lived with him felt like a dismissal of their fear and loss. For many others, he became a symbol of every wild animal pushed out of its home by people.

Victim or villain?

The honest answer is that Arikkomban was neither a monster nor a martyr. He was a wild elephant who, from a very young age, grew up alone in a shrinking habitat surrounded by people, and who learned to feed himself in a way that brought him into constant conflict with them. The people who lived with him were not villains either: they were tribal families, estate workers, shopkeepers and farmers, many of them poor, some of them settled in elephant country by the government itself.

His story raises questions that Kerala and Tamil Nadu are still answering:

• Land use. Should people be settled in elephant corridors, and what should be done about settlements that already exist there?
• Food and waste. How can ration shops, kitchens and waste dumps be protected so that they do not teach elephants to raid?
• Translocation. Experts note that moving a "problem" elephant rarely solves the problem: the animal may return, cause conflict elsewhere, or be replaced by another. Arikkomban's walk into Cumbum showed how quickly a translocation can go wrong.
• Compensation and protection. How can people living on the forest edge be properly compensated and protected, so that they do not bear the cost of conservation alone?
• Fame and evidence. How should decisions about wildlife be made when public emotion runs high, and when key facts, like how many people an elephant has killed, are not firmly established?

Arikkomban is still alive, somewhere in the forests above the Kodayar reservoir, about 300 km from the hills where he was born. If the local account of his birth is right, he is now about 40 years old. We hope he lives out his life there in peace, and that the lessons of his story help the next elephant, and the next family, in the hills around Munnar. (Read also our stories of Padayappa, the king of Munnar, and the wild animals of Munnar and the Western Ghats.)