The 'Elephant Guy' Saving Elephants in India | The Making of Asia | BBC Earth

Everyone's really pleased. They want to come out and see the elephants. I think a lot of that is to do with Ganesh's popularity. They don't know my name, but they refer to me as Yanakar, which means the elephant guy. The people living here, they always have stories to share about how they saw elephants 20 years ago or 30 years ago. The Western Ghats are a biodiverse mountain range in southern India. Here, a BBC crew are filming a herd of resident elephants. But these sentient creatures are caught in the middle of a conflict. This seemingly lush green habitat is in fact dominated by tea plantations. Here, in this changing landscape, Ganesh Raghunathan is working tirelessly to protect India's magnificent giants. They refer to me as Yanakar, which means the elephant guy. The sweet part of my work is I get to follow elephants and I get to spend a lot of time with them. My other part of my work was to ensure that people are aware about elephant presence, try and find ways to reduce the negative encounters that happen between the two species. What was once an unbroken stretch of forest where elephants roamed freely is now a patchwork of farms and plantations fragmenting their natural habitats. Currently, this landscape supports about 70,000 to 80,000 people. This automatically brings people and elephants in a place where they are forced to share resources and space. There's not any other option. We cannot expect elephants not to be here, neither can we expect people not to be here. One source of conflict is the belief that elephants jeopardize livelihoods by eating the tea leaves. But this is not the case. Elephants do not eat tea, many times you will see elephants standing in tea estates and dusting the mud off or whatever they've plucked up and at that point of time you will think it is tea but actually it's the weeds that grow in between these tea bushes so they're actually doing a service to the plantations itself. Despite their weeding skills, the presence of such large, curious animals in human landscapes can be destructive. Individuals like Ganesh are working tirelessly to come up with new solutions in order to help local communities affected by these conflicts. For us to be able to successfully track elephants, we rely a lot on the networks that we've built over the years. We've basically built a strong network where this information is made available to not just us, but to everybody else living in this landscape. Ganesh has created an early warning system that informs residents when elephants are around, minimizing surprising encounters and decreasing conflict. And the team is able to observe the direct benefits of his hard work firsthand. So we've been following this herd in the tea plantations and this morning they've crossed over into this forest area. They now want to get back across this main road into the tea plantations. There's a constant stream of motorbikes, cars and buses and it's attracted quite a crowd because everyone wants to see them come out. Ganesh and the forest guards are just trying to let them cross in peace, to try to hold people and the vehicles back so that they don't feel intimidated and they can just get across safely and in a stress-free way. Everyone's got their cameras out to actually see the elephants up close and out in the open. Everyone's Really pleased. They want to come out and see the elephants. I think a lot of that is to do with Ganesh's popularity. He's spread the word about the elephants, and people all respect him, so they're happy to wait, which is testament to Ganesh. Through education and his innovative warning system, Ganesh has reduced the severity of human-elephant conflict in the Western Ghats, leading to a remarkable coexistence. I think there's a lot of tolerance towards wildlife. People do enjoy watching wildlife and love wildlife. There is still good hope for wildlife to thrive.