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Sri Lanka's newest elephant corridor is six years old

Kate Blanche
Aug 25
4 min read



Around World Elephant Day this month, Sri Lankan outlets ran a striking claim about the government's new "Wanaspathi" conservation programme: elephants are staying inside protected reserves more than they used to, and village intrusions are "substantially reducing" as a result. No study backs that claim. No survey, no camera-trap data, no comparison figure. It appeared, worded almost identically, in at least two outlets on the same two days, and it ran the same week Newswire reported the year's elephant death toll at roughly 180, on pace to challenge 2025's record of 438.

That claim sits on top of a programme with a more complicated history than the government's own press materials suggest.

A forestry programme that became an elephant programme

Wanaspathi launched in July 2025 as a national forest-cover initiative: raise Sri Lanka's forest cover to 32% by 2030, tied to its Paris Agreement commitments. At launch, in Gampaha, there was no mention of elephants, corridors or human-elephant conflict. The first public commentary on it, an engineer's opinion piece three days later, was about planting trees along roads and streams to help with urban flooding.

A year passed. Then, in a five-day window in July 2026, the Ministry of Environment attached the Wanaspathi name to elephant conservation for the first time, almost exactly on the programme's own anniversary. A written release on 4 July credited it with "specialised elephant enrichment zones." Two days later, Deputy Minister Anton Jayakody described the same enrichment work at a press conference, this time without mentioning Wanaspathi at all. Two days after that, the same work launched again, under a third name, the "National Program for Wild Elephant Habitat Enrichment and Rehabilitation." Three announcements of what reads as the same underlying activity, five days, three different framings.

A month later, on 5 August, a parliamentary monitoring committee heard almost the same four measures again, corridor clearing, Wanaspathi enrichment zones, stepped-up enforcement, resourcing for the Department of Wildlife Conservation, presented as evidence of what the Ministry had already done while it decided what belongs in a new National Action Plan.

The corridor that isn't new

The clearest example is a corridor called Wetahirakanda. On 8 June 2026, the Ministry announced it had cleared three elephant corridors, Wetahirakanda, Hadapanagala and Koholankala, blocked for years by "unplanned development projects and politically motivated land allocations." The same release said the government "plans to establish" elephant enrichment zones, future tense, no name attached yet.

Wetahirakanda has been reported on before. In June 2020, Daily Mirror ran a feature on Sri Lanka's vanishing elephant corridors, quoting the Department of Wildlife Conservation's Director General at the time, M.G.C. Sooriyabandara, on the state of corridor declarations across the country. Only one corridor, Kaudulla-Minneriya, had ever actually been gazetted, back in 2004. Sixteen others, according to a 2018 Auditor General's Report, still hadn't been. Asked about Wetahirakanda specifically, Sooriyabandara said there was already "progress" toward declaring it, and that the Forest Department expected to formalise it "in the near future."

That was six years before this year's announcement. Whatever happened between 2020 and 2026 to finally close it out, "cleared" in June 2026 describes the tail end of a process with years of runway behind it, not something a change of government started and finished from nothing.

The 2020 piece also names why corridors like this get blocked in the first place: a private mango plantation inside a corridor bordering Kala Wewa, sixty acres of temple land near Galgamuwa leased to another mango grower, an aloe vera project and a tank built into land near Wilpattu that conservationists say sits inside the same corridor. More land was cleared during the pandemic curfew, when no one was watching. None of that is specific to the current government. It's the same failure the 2020 National Action Plan was written to end: land inside known elephant corridors going to commercial use faster than it goes to conservation.

What actually changed

Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando is quoted in that same 2020 piece making the point his research is known for: Sri Lankan elephants don't migrate long distances. They live within small home ranges and use the same routes to avoid people. Development that blocks one of those routes doesn't redirect the elephant somewhere else, it pushes it into a village. That's the finding underneath the 2020 National Action Plan Fernando's committee later wrote, the one that measurably reduced deaths when it was funded in 2024, before the government changed and implementation stopped.

None of the 2026 announcements name Fernando or the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society. The corridor work being credited to Wanaspathi rests on the same evidence Fernando and Sooriyabandara were describing in 2020. The people who built that evidence aren't in the room for the version of it now being presented as new.

Why this matters this week

Sri Lanka's government is mid-decision on what its new National Action Plan will actually contain. A committee under Environment Minister Dr. Dhammika Patabendi is deciding it now. The corridor and enrichment-zone work getting credited to Wanaspathi isn't evidence the current approach is working, it's a six-year-old process, finally closed out, wearing a year-old programme's name. The claim that it's already reducing village intrusions has no data behind it, made the same week the year's own death toll said otherwise.

Sri Lanka doesn't need a rebrand of work already in progress before this government took office. It needs the plan its own scientists wrote, fully funded, with the people who wrote it back in the room and being listened to.


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