Bannerghatta National Park, two hours outside of the southern Indian city of Bengaluru, is silent on a late August evening. A narrow roadway with “Elephant Crossing” signs winds through the trees. Then, the trumpeting of elephants pierces the air as they plunge across the road, chewing on leaves.

This region — comprised of Bannerghatta in the state of Karnataka, the Cauvery North Wildlife Sanctuary and Hosur scrub forests in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu — has more than 600 elephants.

And they’re constantly on the move, using well-trodden paths to search for the hundreds of pounds of fresh fodder they need daily to survive. More recently, however, some of these elephants have altered their routes, traveling to a coastal state that hasn’t seen elephants in 200 years: Andhra Pradesh.

Their arrival is the result of complex factors, including climate change and deforestation, and is making life dangerous for both elephants and people. Now, farming communities are trying to navigate living with these enormous, intelligent animals for the first time.

Elephant crossings

“India is the last bastion of the Asian elephant,” said Avinash Krishnan, who runs the conservation nonprofit A Rocha India.

More than half of all Asian elephants are found in four clusters across the country. But in recent years, their home ranges have been changing. Some, near Bannerghatta, have traveled eastward through a patchwork of forests, crop lands and villages.

In response, the government constructed a narrow, 17-mile elephant corridor to funnel elephants back and forth from Bannerghatta to the Kaundinya Wildlife Sanctuary in Andhra Pradesh.

Such corridors are essential. One report by the Wildlife Trust of India says, “In the fragmented, human-transformed landscapes that typify most elephant habitats in Asia today, corridors thus ensure that [the] nutritional, demographic and genetic needs [of elephants] are met.”

Development projects and expanding agricultural fields are, however, eating into corridors like the one in Andhra Pradesh, and experts like Krishnan are skeptical of its utility.

“The concept of a corridor is that it should connect somewhere to somewhere, right?” he asked. “This is somewhere to nowhere.”

He pointed out that the elephants’ path requires crossing a major highway and railway line — where elephants have even been hit by trains.

They also cross the tri-state junction, where the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh converge.

One forest department official who preferred to go only by his first name, Govindappa, said that from his vantage point atop a hill, “we can see the elephants moving near the villages,” snacking on vegetables, like tomatoes.

He added that forest officials regularly burst firecrackers to scare elephants into leaving their state and moving into another. The area becomes thick with smoke and noise.

“From here, they go there. From there, they go here,” Govindappa said.

Many end up in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, where their lives don’t get any easier. Out of 28 elephant fatalities in the district since 2011, at least 21 died from electrocution.

“Being an elephant here is not easy,” Krishnan said.

Living in fear

It’s not easy for people either.

One elderly farmer who goes only by Swaminathan lives in Palluru, a village of several hundred people. For three years, elephants have visited his fields at night to eat rice, bananas and mangoes. He said that each raid leaves him frightened.

“Recently, one elephant killed two people nearby, a man and a woman,” he explained.

Swaminathan remembered seeing a particularly threatening male. “It was a huge elephant. It was running, its legs were this wide,” he gestured. “If it had stepped on someone …” he said, shaking his head, imagining what could have happened. 

In just over a decade, more than 25 people have been killed by elephants in Chittoor.

Across this vast agrarian district of more than 5,000 square miles, A Rocha India estimates that elephants may be found in 23 of 66 “sub-districts,” or smaller administrative zones within the broader district.

One farmer, who goes only by Chandramma, shared that these encounters make it hard for her to rest. “I won’t sleep for two or three nights. Then, on the fourth night, they will come,” she said.

When elephants first arrived, many people were excited. It felt like being visited by the Hindu god, Ganesh, who has the head of an elephant. But that feeling has been replaced by anxiety.

“If I see them, I’m very scared,” shared another farmer, Prasham Mantri. “I stay inside.”

The role of climate change

To help minimize human-elephant conflicts, experts are trying to understand why elephants are traveling more than 100 miles northeast to Chittoor in the first place.

They categorize the reasons as “push” factors, which force elephants out of native habitats, and “pull” factors, which incentivize elephants to visit new areas.

The first elephants arrived in the area in the 1980s, which experts say was probably in response to a climate event. Raman Sukumar, an expert on Asian elephants, said, “1982 has been described as the most intense El Nino year of the last century.”

With little food or water in the Bannerghatta region, several elephants left.

“I call this the last straw that broke the camel’s back,” Sukumar said. “Elephants decided, ‘OK, I have to go look for fresh pastures.’”

They found those pastures in Andhra Pradesh.

According to state estimates, around 30 elephants were living in the district roughly a decade ago but by 2024 there were at least 100. One reason is the vast fields of rice, corn, mangoes and bananas that now cover the landscape.

In this semi-arid region, this was once an unusual sight. Traditionally, farmers used the limited, seasonal rains to plant heartier crops, like millets.

Environmental scientist Kameswara Rao Kotamraju said that until the early 1990s, “the weather pattern [in the region] was standard, going by the norms of the meteorological departments.”

However, “over the past two to three decades, the pattern is drastically changing.”

As climate change in the Bay of Bengal made rain patterns unpredictable, farmers started drilling into the ground to access water from aquifers. And with irrigation methods supported by the government, they could shift towards water-intensive cash crops.

Elephants were likely pulled there by the promise of nutrient-dense food.

“If crops are the foremost diet of elephants, then climate change has a direct bearing on it,” Avinash Krishnan of A Rocha India said.

Since crops are now planted year-round, elephants have grown accustomed to having easier access to them.

Krishnan said that this means human encounters with elephants have shifted from a seasonal occurrence to something that happens throughout the year.

New irrigation methods allow farmers to grow cash crops that help them survive in a changing climate. But this also means the looming presence of elephants may never be too far away.

One farmer who goes only by Varalaxmi, captured the sense of helplessness that many feel as she sat with her husband near an orchard of mango trees.

“Even if we get scared, what are we supposed to do about it?”

This story was produced with the support of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.