A team of vets, four ‘kumki’ and one tranquilliser dart: the plan to capture Kerala’s marauding elephant

The trail of destruction left by an elephant in Kerala could finally come to an end on Sunday as a crack team of experts plan to capture him.

The team of 71 vets, forest officers and field workers have identified a specific spot among the wooded hills in Idukki district where Arikompan – which means the Rice Tusker, because of his love for rice – comes every couple of days to cool off in water.

The plan is to ambush him at the spot and remove him from the area, where he has trampled 10 people to death and crushed 60 shops and homes.

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As elephant habitats shrink across India, elephants like Arikompan have increasingly ended up near human communities in their search for food. The encounters usually end badly for both elephant and human.

His favourite targets have been the government food shops scattered all over the district which distribute free wheat, sugar and rice to people below the poverty line. Once, he waylaid a truck that was carrying rice and other grains to those shops.

Arikompan is about 30 years old and the area has been his stomping ground since childhood.

Elephants are adored by many in Kerala, they have their own fan clubs where admirers wax lyrical about their personalities and physical features, and no special ceremony is complete without a resplendently decorated elephant to lend majesty to the occasion.

“We respect elephants in Kerala but this one has gone too far for too long now,” said Sheeba George, an Idukki district collector. “People can’t sleep at night for fear that he will come crashing through the doors or windows.”

The mission and its large team will be led by Arun Radhakrishnan Sobhana, who said: “Once he comes to the area we have identified – a flat piece of land, not a hilly area which won’t work – one of our team will get as close as he can, to about 50 metres, to shoot a tranquilliser dart at him.”

The team will not be wearing special protective equipment. “The only thing that can help us if anything goes wrong is a good pair of legs for running.”

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If the dosage is about right for the roughly 3,300kg elephant, he will become calm and docile in 45 minutes and the team will converge on him for the trickiest part of all – getting Arikompan on to a truck loaded with a huge cage before the ketamine solution wears off.

The key members will be four kumki, or captive elephants, deployed for such operations to catch rogue elephants. They will travel 340km from their camp in Wayanad to Idukki to lend their heft.

“We will tie his legs,” Sobhana said. “One kumki elephant will pull from the front, the second will push from the rear and on each side – an elephant will, basically, frogmarch him up the ramp and on to the truck.”

While the rest of the team has vast experience of capturing elephants, it is only Sobhana’s second time. But he is not nervous. “My team have done this about 20 times at least so they are veterans and I am in good hands,” he said, adding: “If we don’t succeed on Sunday, we will keep trying until we do.”