Wild elephants have been terrorising the people of Kemalipur, Eklebar and Sukumbasi Basti in Dhanusha district for the past one week.

Three elephants have been entering the settlements and destroying crops and homes.  

Badri Bikram Baniya, a local man, said they had not slept well for days.

The elephants have already destroyed around two dozen homes.

A team from the Province 2 Ministry of Forestry inspected the three settlements and inquired the locals about the situation on Monday.

Locals said the three elephants lived in Pokhari Damar Community Forest during the day and entered their settlements at night to attack their crops and homes.

They demanded the provincial government to drive away the elephants and provide compensation to those families whose properties had been damaged or destroyed.

Yubaraj Upreti, the ward chairman of Mithila Municipality-7, said the villagers were being forced to leave their homes at night because of elephant terror.

The government should come up with a long-term plan to keep the elephants away from settlements, he added.

Parsa park installs electric fence

PARSA: Parsa National Park has constructed a 14.5 km-long electric fence to mitigate human-wildlife conflict. According to the park authority, 9.5 km fence has been constructed from Basantapur Area Forest Office to the western part of Oriya Khola and another 5 km fence from Oriya Khola to Panitanki Road. Wild elephants have long been troubling the people living at the park’s buffer zone. The fence has been built to control wild elephants from entering the villages. It took around Rs 7 million to build the fence. The park is planning to hand over the task of fence maintenance to the forest users’ committees.