Elephants Are Going Thirsty in Yala. The Wildlife Chief Calls That "Nature's Course."

The Sri Lankan tusker has never been just an animal. It is woven into the island's cultural identity, carved into temple walls across the country. Its most famous form is a six-tusked white elephant: according to Buddhist teachings, one appeared to Queen Maya in a dream, announcing the birth of the Buddha before he was even born. Right now, in Yala National Park, decisions are being made that could leave the tusker exactly that: a carving, not a living creature.

Sri Lanka is entering an El Niño drought expected to peak in November, and the country is already feeling it: the Irrigation Department's major reservoirs have dropped to about 40% capacity, with meteorologists warning of water shortages in the Northern, North Central, Eastern and Hambantota districts months before the worst of it arrives. Yala's tanks are supposed to follow the same cycle every year, filling in the rains and shrinking in the dry months. But many of them are already degraded, worn down by years of neglect. WNPS's 2025 annual report describes exactly this pattern across the Dry Zone's village tanks: dams "have been breached and never properly repaired," or the tanks "have silted up reducing their holding capacities," or "Invasive Alien Species have clogged the waterbodies and inlets feeding them." Yala's own tanks are largely the same kind of infrastructure, old irrigation tanks absorbed into the park over the past century, and show the same neglect. Even the park's own former warden noted it decades ago: "The breached and denuded earth bunds of several irrigation tanks are still visible," Childers Jayawardhana wrote in his 1993 guide to the park, "together with natural water holes and tanks improved to hold water." The dry season alone doesn't explain it. These tanks were already failing, and El Niño is about to make that a great deal worse.

You don't need the modelling to see what that means. A tusker named Nandimithra was filmed reaching his trunk through the open window of a water tanker truck, searching inside the cab, as it brought water in for pilgrims on the Pada Yatra, the foot pilgrimage to Kataragama that passes through Yala. Elephants learn where water is reliable, and a truck refilling tanks for pilgrims is exactly that kind of place; with nowhere left in his own range to drink, he went where the water was. This wasn't Nandimithra's first tense encounter with a vehicle, a pattern shaped by repeated run-ins rather than any innate aggression, and those nearby panicked because they knew his history, which is likely why the footage first got captioned as him "attacking" the truck. But the fuller footage shows no aggression, just a thirsty animal refusing to be turned away: this time, it wasn't the reputation, it was the thirst. Wildlife officials drove him off with firecrackers (ali wedi). Nobody addressed the water. He'll be back, and so will every other thirsty animal in that park. You can chase an elephant away from a water source, but you cannot chase away its thirst.

Tuskers like him are already exceptionally rare. The DWC's 2024 count put Sri Lanka's elephant population at 7,451, widely reported as a population boom. But a count built on elephants turning up at waterholes is not a reliable way to count a population: without near-simultaneous coverage across every site, the same animal gets tallied twice, once at one waterhole and again at the next as it wanders on to drink somewhere else days later. That isn't a census. It's an estimate dressed up as one. A more conservative independent estimate puts the real population at 5,000 to 6,000, well under the DWC's figure. Research published in 'Loris', the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society's journal, found that under 7% of Sri Lanka's male elephants are tuskers. Combined with that lower population estimate and a roughly one-to-three male-to-female ratio, that works out to under 100 tuskers left on the island and that number keeps shrinking nationwide: in recent years, tuskers Rewatha, Barana and Deegadanthu-1 were all electrocuted by illegal fences in the Kalawewa area, and Unicorn and Koliya were shot dead in Minneriya. Against that backdrop, the response from the Department of Wildlife Conservation is hard to defend. Director General Ranjan Marasinghe told Mongabay in July that "we need to allow nature's course to take place," arguing that "wild animals develop a ruggedness during drought conditions and that is required to strike a balance in the ecosystem." By his own account, the maintenance side of the job is casual rather than systematic: he told Mongabay the park's water pumps "are being repaired from time to time," whenever that turns out to be. Nothing in Yala right now suggests this is one of those times. It's framed as science. But the tanks in Yala were failing before this drought arrived. A drought exposes broken infrastructure; it doesn't create it. These tanks failed from neglect. Calling that natural selection is a way of avoiding the cost of fixing it.

For weeks, animal welfare organisations and environmentalists pushed to bring water into Yala. Marasinghe said no, on the record, treating thirst as a legitimate form of population control, even though water has been supplied from outside during past droughts (DWC bowsers did this during the 2016 drought), so the capacity and the precedent both existed. He chose not to use them.

He has since walked that back, at least partly. After footage of dry watering holes circulated and pressure built, the DWC started trucking water into Yala. But according to someone with direct knowledge of water operations at Yala, water is reaching the areas along the tourist roads, where visitors and cameras are, and not the ground away from them.

That's what worries people watching closely: water shows up when there are cameras and complaints. The real question isn't whether Marasinghe changed his mind, but whether he actually did, or whether this is a pause that ends the moment nobody's looking. That moment has a date. Yala's routine closure begins September 1, typically for about six weeks, a period with reportedly no water supplied and no way for anyone, DWC included, to check what's happening inside. In 2017, also a severe drought year, that closure ran two full months instead of six weeks. A drought this severe, arriving on schedule for a closure with no water and no oversight, has a documented history of getting worse, not better.

Money isn't the obstacle either. The World Bank has already funded exactly this kind of infrastructure in Sri Lanka: a $45 million credit in 2016 for ecosystem conservation and management, and a $69.5 million project signed in 2021 to improve dams, irrigation schemes and watershed management nationwide. None of it required the Treasury to find the money Yala's tanks need repaired. Whatever is stopping that work from reaching Yala's water holes, it isn't a lack of funding. It's a lack of will. What gets decided in the months ahead could determine how many elephants are still here in five years.

The tusker, the rarest expression of Elephas maximus maximus, is down to under a hundred individuals. It risks becoming nothing more than a carving on a temple wall. The tusker is still alive. Whether it stays that way isn't up to nature.

For the latest on this story, see our follow‑up, ‘The DWC Says It’s Trucking Water Into Yala. We’re Still Watching'