Supreme Court Chalks Out A Health Plan For Elephants

A week after World Elephant Day was observed on August 12 came the news of the Supreme Court of India stepping in to speak up for the health and well-being of captive elephants across the country.

The three-judge Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, directed the Union government to issue guidelines and coordinate with states to set up specialised elephant clinics where private owners will have to take their pachyderms for periodic health check-ups.

It also directed the Captive Elephant Healthcare and Welfare Committee to lay down minimum standards for their housing and maintenance. The directions came during hearings of a PIL filed in 2014 on the issue.

Private Ownership And Welfare

The significance of these directions lies in the fact that India has over 2,500 captive elephants, of which approximately 65-70 per cent are privately owned by temples, tourist operators, circus owners, and other individuals.

Although the Asian elephant is protected under Schedule 1 of the Wildlife Protection Act, an exemption made decades ago allowed private ownership to those who held its legacy, but there has been a continuous battle between the owners and minders of the captive elephants and the authorities over their health and welfare, exploitation during festivals and many temple rituals, and trading, which is patently illegal.

Clearer Responsibility For Care

The SC directions have now clearly drawn the boundaries of who is responsible for the health and well-being of these elephants and how state authorities can support this through clinics and other measures.

While the legal framework and state-specific rules exist for wildlife protection, including that of elephants in the wild and in captivity, the roadblock has been implementing them with a single-minded focus on the welfare of the elephants.

The SC’s directions established a line of command and showed pathways towards this. The number of captive elephants may be just about 10 per cent of the elephant population in India, but, from the perspectives of ecology and multispecies justice, every elephant matters.

Protection Of Wild Elephants

India is home to nearly 60 per cent of the world’s wild Asian elephants, and government records, including the elephant census 2021-25, counted 22,446 of the pachyderms in their ecological habitats around the country.

With 33 dedicated elephant reserves and 150 identified elephant corridors, which connect their fragmented habitats to enable their safe movement, the focus has been rightly on the wild elephants; the SC directions helped repivot to captive ones too.

The wild elephants are now threatened by creeping urbanism, as in the Kaziranga National Park. In this key habitat and elephant corridor, the Assam government seeks to reduce the buffer eco-sensitive zone from the existing 10 kilometres to barely a kilometre in order to facilitate urban growth and livelihoods. As much as the captive elephants, their herds in the wild, too, need protection from the SC.

Published on: Wednesday, August 19, 2026, 10:10 PM IST