29.05.21 Daily [Uttarakhand] UKPSC Current Affairs

Erratic weather patterns have been hitting the natural sources of water in forests for years now, forcing wild animals to move out of their natural habitats in search of water. This would often lead to human-animal conflict incidents inUttarakhand.

To address this issue, the state forest department, sometime ago, started a massive drive to arrange artificial water sources for wild animals in the reserved and protected forest areas, includingRajaji Tiger Reserveand Haridwar forest divisions where the cases of human-animal conflict deaths were going up.

This year, the Rajaji Tiger Reserve has recorded just one human-wildlife conflict incident whereas no such case surfaced in the Haridwar forest divisions.

Notably, Uttarakhand is Home to 2,026 elephants, according to an estimation done by the forest department in 2020. A majority of these jumbos are found in the Shivalik Elephant Reserve, which is spread across more than a dozen forest divisions and protected wildlife areas of Uttarakhand.