Environment · Wildlife · Long read · 18 min read

When the Forest Comes to the Door: Human–Wildlife Conflict in Munnar, Kerala and the World

Elephants in the tea lines, gaur on the town roads, leopards taking cattle, and families who no longer walk home after dark. Why conflict between people and wild animals has grown in and around Munnar, how the shrinking of wild habitat lies at its root, and what the rest of the world can teach us.

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

On a February evening in 2024, an autorickshaw climbed the estate road towards the top of Kannimala, near Munnar. At the wheel was Suresh Kumar, known to everyone as Mani, a 45-year-old driver from the estate. His passengers were a family returning from their 12-year-old daughter's school anniversary celebration. In the dark, a wild elephant attacked the vehicle. Mani was trapped beneath the overturned autorickshaw and died. The family were injured. Local officials suspected the tusker known as Padayappa.

Stories like this have become part of life in the hills of Idukki. So have stories of elephants breaking into ration shops, gaur walking through the town at night, leopards and tigers taking cattle from the estate sheds, and wild pigs destroying a season's vegetables in a single night. And there is another side to the story: elephants electrocuted by illegal fences, animals hit on the roads, and wild animals that, by some estimates, are declining even as conflict rises.

This article looks at the facts behind the conflict between people and wild animals in and around Munnar, places it in the context of Kerala, India and the world, and asks why it is happening. Its central argument is one on which most scientists agree: the root of the conflict is the shrinking and breaking up of wild habitat, as people have moved ever further into land that was once forest. But it also tries to be fair to the people who live with wild animals, many of whom did not choose where they live, and to the complexity of a problem that has no simple villain.

The scale of the problem

Kerala is one of the most densely populated states in India, and one of the most forested. Nearly 30% of its land area is recorded as forest, and most of its 14 districts touch the Western Ghats. Few places in the world bring so many people into such close contact with so many large wild animals.

The official figures, though collected in different ways and over different periods, tell a consistent story:

Snakebite, surprisingly to many, causes the largest number of deaths, but it is elephants, wild pigs, gaur, monkeys, leopards and tigers that dominate the public debate, because they destroy crops and homes and because their attacks are so visible. A study for the Kerala State Planning Board found that elephants, wild pigs and monkeys together account for about 87% of negative interactions between people and wildlife in the state.

The conflict has also become one of the most powerful political issues in Kerala's hill districts. In March 2024, after a series of deaths, the state cabinet declared human–wildlife conflict a state-specific disaster, bringing in the State Disaster Management Authority and committees at state and district level; by 2025, relief and compensation could also be paid through the disaster response fund. The forest department divided the state into 12 conflict landscapes and identified 273 panchayats as conflict zones. In October 2025 the Kerala Assembly passed the Wild Life (Protection) (Kerala Amendment) Bill, the first attempt by any state to amend the central law, to give the Chief Wildlife Warden the power to order dangerous animals to be killed, tranquilised, captured or relocated more quickly. Because the original law is a central act, the amendment needs the assent of the President of India; it was forwarded for assent in late 2025.

Munnar: a landscape transformed

To understand why conflict is so intense around Munnar, we have to look at how the land itself has changed over the last century and a half.

From forest to tea

Until the 1870s, the High Range was a vast expanse of montane forest, shola and grassland, home to elephants, gaur, tigers and tahr, and to the Muthuvan and other forest communities. In 1877 the Poonjar royal family leased the Kannan Devan Hills to John Daniel Munro, and over the following decades the planting companies cleared the forests of the middle slopes and valleys to plant coffee, cinchona and then tea. (We tell this story in our history of Munnar and our article on the early European settlers.) The tea estates of Munnar, beautiful as they are, are a monoculture that replaced some of the richest forests in South India.

Dams and reservoirs

In the twentieth century, the rivers of the High Range were dammed for power and irrigation. Reservoirs at Kundala, Mattupetty and Anayirangal flooded valley floors, which are often the best feeding grounds for elephants and the routes they use to move between hills. The name Anayirangal itself means "where the elephants descend". Ironically, the reservoirs also became a permanent source of water that now draws elephants to the very places where people live and visit.

Settlement and land

After Indian independence, waves of migration brought farmers into the hill forests of Idukki, encouraged at first by government schemes to grow more food. Forest land was cleared for cardamom, pepper, coffee, rubber and food crops. Some settlement was legal and planned; some was encroachment that was later regularised; and some remains disputed to this day. Large areas of the district, including the Cardamom Hill Reserve, remain the subject of long-running legal and political disputes over whether they are forest or farmland.

In 2001–02, the state government resettled about 300 landless tribal families at Chinnakanal, on land that the Munnar Divisional Forest Officer of the time had warned was an elephant corridor. The settlement, known as 301 Colony, became the home ground of the elephant Arikkomban. The Kerala High Court later described the resettlement as "imprudent". It is a clear example of how decisions about land, however well-intentioned, can create conflict that lasts for decades, with both the people and the animals paying the price.

Tourism and construction

Since the 1990s, Munnar has become one of the most popular hill destinations in India. Hotels, resorts, homestays and tent camps have spread along the roads and up the hillsides, many on land that was once plantation, grassland or forest edge. In 2007, the state government carried out a high-profile demolition drive against illegal constructions on government land in Munnar, but unauthorised building has remained a recurring concern. Each new building, fence and access road removes a little more space from the animals, and brings more people, more vehicles, more noise and more waste into their paths.

Roads and barriers

Roads, especially widened highways, act as barriers that cut habitats into pieces. The widening of the Kochi–Dhanushkodi National Highway between Munnar and Bodimettu, with its high retaining walls and cuttings on steep slopes, has made it harder for animals to cross between the forests on either side. Electric fences and trenches, built to keep animals out of farms, can also block their traditional routes and push them into other people's land.

Forests without food

Not all the damage is visible as cleared land. Much of the forest that remains is poorer in food for wild animals than it once was. Over the twentieth century, the forest department and plantation companies planted large areas with eucalyptus, acacia and wattle for timber, fuel and pulp. These trees provide almost no fodder for elephants and gaur. Arikkomban's home range at Chinnakanal included about 365 hectares dominated by eucalyptus. Invasive plants such as lantana and, in Wayanad, the South American tree Senna spectabilis, which covers nearly a quarter of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary in some estimates, have smothered the native grasses and shrubs on which herbivores feed. Scientists at the Kerala Forest Research Institute and elsewhere have argued that a shortage of food in the forest is one of the main reasons animals are drawn to farms and settlements.

Waste and easy food

A wild elephant that finds a reliable source of food will come back for it. Rice in ration shops and kitchens taught Arikkomban to raid. Vegetables, fruit and food waste at open garbage dumps, such as the waste plant at Kallar near Munnar, drew the tusker Padayappa and other animals towards town. Wild pigs and monkeys, in particular, thrive on the food that people leave behind.

Climate and water

Changes in climate add further pressure. Hotter, drier summers and failing streams push animals towards reservoirs, rivers and wells, many of which lie near settlements. Unseasonal and extreme rain, such as the floods of 2018 and the landslide at Pettimudi in 2020, destroy habitats and disturb animals' movements. (We discuss these changes in our article on Munnar's changing climate.)

The bigger picture: forests lost, habitats broken

Munnar's story is part of a much larger one. Studies of satellite images and historical maps show how much forest the Western Ghats have lost:

• A study by Menon and Bawa estimated that forests in the Western Ghats were being lost at about 0.57% per year between 1920 and 1990: a loss, over seventy years, of a large part of the forest that existed in 1920.
• In Kerala, studies estimate forest losses of about 8–10% in the three decades from 1960 to 1990 alone, mainly to agriculture, plantations and development projects.
• In the southern Western Ghats, satellite studies of the period from 1973 to 1995 found that forests were replaced mainly by plantations and agricultural land, and that the fastest change was in Kerala, with its high population density.

Across Asia as a whole, a 2023 study in Scientific Reports, led by Shermin de Silva, found that more than 64% of the suitable habitat of the Asian elephant has been lost since 1700, most of it after the start of the colonial era, as forests were cleared for timber and agriculture. The average size of a block of suitable habitat fell by more than 80%. In India, elephants are now restricted to an estimated 3–4% of their original range. The authors warned that this shrinking and fragmentation pushes elephants into human-dominated land, creating a "high potential for conflict".

Globally, the World Wide Fund for Nature's Living Planet Report 2024 found that the average size of monitored wildlife populations had fallen by 73% since 1970, with habitat loss and degradation among the main drivers.

In simple terms: wild animals have far less room than they once had, and much of the room they still have is broken into islands separated by farms, plantations, roads and towns. When animals need to move between these islands to find food, water and mates, or when the islands do not hold enough food, they come into conflict with people.

It is not only encroachment

An honest account must also recognise other factors, some of which point in different directions.

• Successful protection. In some places, protection has allowed populations of certain animals, such as gaur, wild pigs and some deer, to recover or increase, and animals that have lost their fear of people are more likely to enter farms and towns.
• Animal behaviour. Crop-raiding is, from an animal's point of view, a sensible choice: farm crops are more nutritious and easier to find than wild food. Young male elephants, in particular, take risks to gain the food they need to grow and compete. Individual animals, like Arikkomban and Padayappa, learn habits that bring them into frequent conflict.
• Changing human use. As some farms are abandoned and plantations neglected, scrub grows up that gives cover to wild pigs, leopards and elephants close to houses.
• Who lives on the forest edge. Many of the people most affected are estate workers whose families have lived in the labour lines for generations, tribal families resettled by the government, and small farmers on land their parents or grandparents were encouraged to clear. To describe them simply as "encroachers" is neither fair nor accurate. They bear the greatest cost of living with wildlife, and often receive the least support.

The animals in conflict around Munnar

• Elephants cause the most serious conflict: damage to houses, ration shops, crops and vehicles, and deaths. Individual tuskers such as Arikkomban, Padayappa and Chakkakomban have become well known.
• Gaur now regularly walk through Munnar town, estate roads and school grounds, and occasionally injure people.
• Leopards and tigers take cattle, goats and dogs from estate sheds and labour lines, causing losses to families who depend on dairy for extra income.
• Wild pigs destroy vegetable and tuber crops in farms across Idukki.
• Bonnet macaques raid houses, shops and tourist vehicles for food, a problem made worse by tourists who feed them.
• Snakes, including Russell's vipers and cobras in the lower hills, account for the largest number of deaths across Kerala as a whole.

The same story around the world

The conflict in Munnar is one local chapter of a worldwide crisis. A 2021 report by WWF and the United Nations Environment Programme, A future for all: the need for human–wildlife coexistence, called human–wildlife conflict one of the main threats to the survival of many of the world's most iconic species. Killing in retaliation for conflict affects more than 75% of the world's wild cat species, as well as species from polar bears to monk seals.

Sri Lanka: the world's worst elephant conflict

Our nearest neighbour across the sea faces the most severe human–elephant conflict in the world. According to figures presented to Sri Lanka's Parliament in February 2025, 3,477 wild elephants and 1,190 people died in human–elephant conflict between 2015 and 2024, and the toll was rising: around 400 elephants a year in recent years. As in Kerala, the root cause is the conversion of elephant habitat to farms, settlements and development projects, which has left elephants squeezed into fragments and moving through villages. Elephants are shot, poisoned, electrocuted and killed by explosive baits hidden in food; people are killed in their fields and homes.

Africa: farms, fences and bees

Across Africa, the rapid growth of farms and settlements around national parks has brought elephants, lions, buffaloes and baboons into conflict with farming and herding communities. Lions killed in retaliation for livestock losses are a major cause of the decline of the species. At the same time, Africa has produced some of the most creative solutions: beehive fences, developed in Kenya, which use elephants' fear of bees to protect farms while giving farmers honey to sell; community conservancies that share tourism income with the people who live with wildlife; and programmes that employ young herders as "lion guardians" to warn their communities and track lions.

The Sundarbans: tigers and the forest's edge

In the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, shared by India and Bangladesh, tigers kill people who enter the forest to collect honey, fish, crabs and wood, often because poverty leaves them no other livelihood. Rising sea levels and the loss of land to erosion are pushing communities and tigers into ever closer contact.

Japan: when people retreat

Conflict does not only arise where people move into the forest. In Japan, bear attacks reached record levels in 2025, with more deaths in a single year than ever before recorded. Experts link this partly to the decline and ageing of rural populations: as villages empty and farmland is abandoned, forest and bears return to the edges of towns. The lesson is that conflict happens wherever the needs of people and wild animals overlap, whether because people have moved into wild land or because animals are returning to land people have left.

Europe: the return of the wolf

In Europe, wolves have recovered and spread into farmland in many countries after decades of legal protection, leading to attacks on sheep and bitter political debate. In 2025 the European Union lowered the wolf's protection status from "strictly protected" to "protected", allowing more flexibility to manage populations, a decision welcomed by many farmers and criticised by many conservationists. The debate mirrors Kerala's own arguments about culling.

What works, and what does not

Around the world, decades of experience have taught some clear lessons.

• Barriers help, but only when they are well planned and maintained. Kerala has spent about ₹75 crore on fences in eight years. Solar fences fail without maintenance, trenches collapse in the monsoon, and fences can simply shift the problem to the next village. Experts call for site-specific planning rather than one-size-fits-all solutions.
• Moving "problem animals" rarely solves the problem. The story of Arikkomban, who walked into Cumbum town a month after being moved to Periyar, shows how translocation can fail. When one animal is removed, another often takes its place.
• Killing animals may give short-term relief but does not address the causes. Culling may be necessary in some cases, especially for individual animals that repeatedly kill people or for overabundant species such as wild pigs, but without restoring habitat and preventing access to easy food, conflict returns.
• Early warning saves lives. In the Valparai plateau of the Anamalai Hills, just across the border from Munnar, the Nature Conservation Foundation and local communities developed a system of SMS alerts and flashing lights that warns people when elephants are nearby. It has helped to reduce deaths in a landscape very similar to Munnar's.
• Removing the attraction works. Protecting ration shops and food stores, managing waste properly and closing open dumps take away the "rewards" that teach animals to raid.
• Restoring habitat and corridors is the long-term answer. Removing eucalyptus, wattle, lantana and Senna and restoring native grassland and forest gives animals food where they belong. Securing corridors between forests, including through voluntary relocation of families living inside forests with fair compensation, allows animals to move without passing through villages.
• Compensation must be fast and fair. People who lose crops, livestock, homes or family members to wildlife need quick and adequate compensation and support. Without it, tolerance for wildlife collapses.
• Community-led solutions work best. In the Sonitpur district of Assam, a community-based programme of crop protection and early warning reduced crop losses in one area from about 212 hectares a year to zero for four years.
• Land-use planning is essential. Above all, decisions about where to build, settle, farm and quarry must take account of where wild animals live and move. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, chaired by Madhav Gadgil, recommended zoning of the Ghats by ecological sensitivity in 2011; its proposals were strongly opposed in Idukki and elsewhere and have still not been fully implemented.

Learning to share the hills

The conflict between people and wild animals in Munnar is not a story of wicked animals or wicked people. It is the story of a landscape that has been transformed in a little over a century, from forest and grassland into tea estates, reservoirs, farms, roads and towns, leaving wild animals in shrinking and broken islands of habitat, and leaving people living on the edges of those islands.

The elephant that walks down a Munnar road at night is not trespassing. In many cases it is following a path its ancestors used long before the road was built. But the family in the autorickshaw is not trespassing either. They are going home.

The solutions are known, even if they are difficult and expensive: protect and restore habitat, reconnect forests, take away easy food, warn people in time, compensate them fairly, and plan the use of land with wildlife in mind. Elsewhere in the world, from Kenya to Valparai, communities have shown that coexistence is possible. Whether the hills of Munnar can be shared by people and wild animals in the decades to come will depend on the choices made now.