A wild elephant, separated from its herd, on Monday morning killed a 30-year-old construction labourer by throwing him to the ground multiple times in Jhargram town.

Sources said Joydeb Kishku and his wife Panmani were heading to work in a nearby village on a bicycle when suddenly they saw the elephant on the road in the Bhaskarkata area. The duo fell from the cycle. Joydeb started running through a field while his wife fell into a trench.

The elephant started chasing Joydeb and caught him shortly.

“The elephant caught my husband and repeatedly threw him to the ground with its trunk. I witnessed the pathetic death from a distance. The road was lonely and no one was there to help me out,” said Panmani.

“Monday’s incident proves how difficult it is to handle a large number of wild elephants in Jhargram. There are 64 wild elephants in Jhargram district which are divided in separate herds as of Monday. However, although the town area is adjacent to the forest, such a death by an elephant in ward 16 of the municipal area is rare,” said a forest official.

Sources in the forest department said recently the Jhargram forest division is handling an average 60-70 wild elephants coming from Odisha and Jharkhand.

“The number of elephants has increased in the past one-and-half years in Jhargram leading the foresters to face an unprecedented crisis to handle human-animal conflict. Last year, around 120 elephants entered and started staying in the Jhargram division,” a source said.

With this death in the town, the number of people killed by elephants in the entire Jhargram district since April 2022 is 10, said foresters.

On July 1, two elephants killed a 75-year-old man after dragging him out from his house and ransacked at least eight houses at the Raibani village of Jhargram.

“The trend of elephants to attack human habitat increased with shortfall of food in the forests. There are no crops in the field either.

The elephants are raiding villages in search of food,” said a senior forest official in Jhargram.

Foresters said they give daily updates of the location of elephant herds in Jhargram’s rural pockets but it is tough to avert such types of attacks.