India's First DNA-Based Elephant Count Identified 4,065 Individual Animals and Estimated 22,446, in a Country With 33 Elephant Reserves and 150 Validated Corridors

India’s first DNA-based elephant count, run by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) from 2021 to 2025, estimated 22,446 wild Asian elephants, within a 95 percent confidence range of 18,255 to 26,645. Field teams walked 660,804 km of forest across 20 states, collected 21,056 dung samples at 37 sites, and identified 4,065 individual elephants from their genetic profiles.

The Environment Ministry says India holds nearly 60 percent of the world’s wild Asian elephants and protects them across 33 Elephant Reserves and 150 ground-validated corridors. The scheme behind the reserves, Project Elephant, was launched in 1992.

How dung becomes a headcount

WII divided the country into grids of 100, 25 and 4 sq km, the same grid used for the tiger estimates. For the DNA work in the states outside the North East, it picked blocks of 200 sq km, split each into 50 cells of 4 sq km, and had teams walk at least 4 km in every cell, collecting about 10 grams of dung from the outer layer of each pile they found. In the lab the samples were read at eleven DNA markers, and each distinct combination counted as one elephant.

A statistical model called spatially explicit capture-recapture then used the number of elephants found only once, and those found again, to estimate how many were never sampled. The logic is the one behind the camera-trap tiger count described in how India counts its tigers and lions, with dung standing in for a photograph. Ground surveys of forest across the country, recording elephant signs, dung, vegetation and human disturbance, let WII extend the result from the sampled blocks to unsampled elephant range.

The North East needed a second round. Early survey data there was thin, and an extrapolation from the 2017 density gave 9,866 for the region. WII surveyed again from December 2024 to January 2025, sampled 13 more sites, analysed 12,022 dung samples, and reported 6,559.

Where the 22,446 live

The Western Ghats hold 11,934 elephants, more than half the total. Karnataka has the most of any state at 6,013 (the Karnataka profile has the state’s own figures), followed by Assam at 4,159, Tamil Nadu at 3,136, Kerala at 2,785 and Uttarakhand at 1,792. The North Eastern hills and Brahmaputra plains hold 6,559, with Assam the largest share. Central India and the Eastern Ghats hold 1,891, of which Odisha has 912, and the Shivalik hills and Gangetic plains hold 2,062.

Why WII says not to compare it with 2017

The Environment Ministry released a first national figure of 27,312 in August 2017. GKToday’s summary says that figure came from direct sightings alone, with dung counts to follow. The ministry’s later answers to Parliament list the 2017 total as 29,964, after 29,391 to 30,711 in 2012 and 27,669 to 27,719 in 2007.

The 2021 to 2025 total is lower than the 2017 figure. WII’s report says the two cannot be compared, because it is the first national estimate by DNA mark-recapture and earlier counts used different methods in different states. The institute describes the new figure as a baseline for future monitoring, and it is working with Project Elephant on a standard method that cheaper surveys can be calibrated against.

Project Elephant, 33 reserves and the legal cover

Project Elephant is a centrally sponsored scheme. The Environment Ministry gives states money and technical help for protecting elephant habitat, for corridors, for easing conflict with people and for captive elephants, while managing the forests remains mainly the states’ job. Since the 2023 to 2024 financial year the scheme has been merged with Project Tiger as Project Tiger and Elephant.

Critical habitats become Elephant Reserves when the Project Elephant Steering Committee approves a notification. The 33 reserves lie in 14 states and cover 80,777 sq km, of which 8,610 sq km were added after 2014, according to the ministry’s 2026 backgrounder. Eleven are in the Western Ghats, covering about 28,000 sq km. They overlap with tiger reserves, sanctuaries and reserved forests that are protected under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 and the Indian Forest Act, 1927. In 2023 the ministry launched a management-effectiveness evaluation for the reserves and piloted it at Shivalik, Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong, Mayurbhanj and Nilgiri.

The elephant is in Schedule I of the 1972 Act, which WII’s report calls the highest legal protection. On 22 October 2010 the Environment Ministry notified it as India’s National Heritage Animal, the IANS agency reported, after the Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife approved the proposal on 13 October and a 12-member Elephant Task Force recommended it in a report of 31 August 2010.

150 corridors, from a 2005 book to a two-year field check

An elephant range can run from 100 to 3,000 sq km, so a herd moves between forest patches along strips of land called corridors. The Wildlife Trust of India produced a pan-India survey of them, Right of Passage, in 2005 with support from Project Elephant, and the Elephant Task Force’s 2010 report listed 88.

After the Project Elephant Steering Committee noted in April 2022 that the 2010 list needed checking, state forest departments and a Project Elephant team with WII’s technical support spent nearly two years validating corridors on the ground. The 2023 report counts 150 in 15 states. Of the 88 on the 2010 list, 74 are active. Elephant use has increased in 59 of the 150, is stable in 29, has fallen in 29 and is impaired in 15, with no information for 18. West Bengal has the most, at 26. Nineteen corridors cross state lines and six link India with Nepal.

The report lists seven corridors restored over the past decades, among them Kaniyanpura to Moyar near Bandipur, Chilla to Motichur in the Rajaji forests, and the Segur corridor in Tamil Nadu. Tamil Nadu reported that illegal resorts in the Segur corridor were sealed under a Supreme Court order of 9 August 2018, according to a Parliament reply of December 2024. The report gives corridor routes only as indicative lines, and asks states to mark exact boundaries and write them into forest working plans.

Trains: 26 elephant deaths in 2013, 12 in 2024

The Railway Minister told the Rajya Sabha on 21 March 2025 that elephant deaths on tracks had dropped from 26 in 2013 to 12 in 2024. The first measure it lists is an AI-enabled intrusion detection system that uses distributed acoustic sensing: optical fibre and stored signatures of elephant movement detect elephants near the track and alert loco pilots, station masters and control rooms. It was working over 141 route km of the Northeast Frontier Railway at that date, and works for 1,158 route km at a cost of Rs 208 crore across eight railway zones were sanctioned. On 5 December 2025 the Railway Minister added that tenders had been awarded for a further 981 route km.

The Northeast Frontier Railway began it in December 2022 in 11 corridors, five in its Alipurduar division and six in its Lumding division. In the eight months to July 2023 it sounded 9,768 alerts, PTI reported, and the railway said none of the 11 corridors had recorded a train-elephant collision since the launch. Asked whether the system had an official name, the Railway Minister said in November 2023, “You can call it ‘Gajraj System’.”

The same reply lists speed restrictions, underpasses, ramps, fencing, warning signs, elephant trackers hired by forest departments, honey bee buzzer devices at level crossings and thermal cameras on trial. A ministry report based on field surveys covered 127 vulnerable railway stretches totalling 3,452.4 km and prioritised 77 of them, 1,965.2 km in 14 states, where 705 structures such as underpasses and ramps are recommended. States reported 81 elephant deaths from train collisions between 2019-20 and 2023-24.

What the ministry’s conflict figures show

WII’s report names expanding coffee and tea plantations, invasive plants, farm fencing and development projects among the pressures breaking up the Western Ghats population, and mining and linear infrastructure in east-central India. The Environment Ministry’s figures for human deaths in elephant attacks, as reported by states, were 574 in 2019-20, 444, 520 and 583 in the next three years, and 606 in 2023-24, a Lok Sabha reply of 22 July 2024 shows. In 2023-24 Odisha reported 154, West Bengal 99, Jharkhand 87 and Assam 74. Some states did not report in some years. WII’s report cites a 2017 study that put central India’s share at under 10 percent of the country’s elephants and nearly 45 percent of human deaths caused by elephants.

Wildlife management is mainly a state matter. Since December 2023 the Centre’s ex-gratia relief for a death from a wild animal attack is Rs 10 lakh, up from Rs 5 lakh, and the ministry issued elephant-specific conflict guidelines in 2023. On 13 August 2026 it released a Regional Action Plan for southern India, covering Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, with Rs 500 crore of central support.