What Sri Lanka’s Elephant Number Was For (Part Two)

In August 2025, a seven-year-old girl named Thinuli was helping her father in a chena field in Hambantota when an elephant charged from the thicket. He tried to save her; he couldn't. Two months later, a farmer defending his crop shot a pregnant elephant dead nearby, killing her unborn calf too. Two deaths, a few kilometres apart, on opposite sides of the same shrinking strip of land. Nationwide, human-elephant conflict kills roughly 100 people and 400 elephants a year; in Hambantota alone, the last decade's toll is 72 people and 154 elephants.

The government's answer wasn't fencing, and it wasn't land reform. It was Sri Lanka's biggest elephant drive in years. Eighty wildlife officers, farmer groups and state agencies, twenty-one days, pushing roughly 60 elephants out of villages and into the Hambantota Managed Elephant Reserve. One night alone, in early November, moved fifteen elephants out of Madunagala village and into the reserve; local papers called it a success. The reserve is a 23,000-hectare zone, first proposed by elephant biologist Prithiviraj Fernando in 2009 and gazetted in 2021, after more than a decade of delay. Even the boundary that finally got gazetted was smaller than Fernando's own study called for - some of the land elephants actually use was carved out for development before the ink dried. The DWC kept shrinking it after that too, adjusting the fence line piece by piece, with its own consent, as encroachment ate into the rest.

This is where the 7,451 figure from part one stopped being an abstract methodology argument and started being policy. Ranjan Marasinghe, the DWC's own Director General, told the Sunday Times in November that the 2024 survey put the population at 7,451 and called it stable. He said this in the same conversation where he admitted 380 elephants had already died that year. The total was on track to beat 2024's toll of 388 before the year was even out. A population isn't stable while its death rate climbs past last year's record. It's just a number someone decided to call stable.

A senior DWC official, speaking to the same paper without his name attached, went further: the drives are a failed concept, he said. Elephants don't stay where they're pushed. They prefer their home range, retaliate when driven from it, and often just walk back. The department knows this. It keeps doing it anyway. Villagers and politicians demand a visible response, and a drive is visible in a way that fencing or land reform isn't. Sumith Pilapitiya, a former DWC Director General, has described exactly this dynamic from the inside: ministers calling him personally to move electric fences off the ecologically correct line and onto the department's own boundary instead, because that was the easier answer politically. On two occasions, he says, he told the minister he'd move the fence only if the minister signed a memorandum accepting responsibility for whatever conflict followed. Both backed off rather than sign it. Nobody wants to own the decision in writing; they just want the department to make the problem disappear.

Sri Lanka has run this exact experiment before. A 2006 drive tried to push elephants out of the same district and into national parks; they starved inside the fences, and conflict spread wider than before. Sri Lanka ran it again in December 2024, driving elephants from Kurunegala and Anuradhapura toward Wilpattu. That operation collapsed at Oyamaduwa, with elephants left stranded and starving. A second drive followed at Mahailuppallama. Now it's Hambantota's turn. Conservationists are calling it, not unreasonably, a slow death sentence.

So why keep doing something the department's own officials call a failure? Sajeewa Chamikara, of the Movement for Land and Agriculture Reform, has pointed to the port expansion and a Chinese industrial zone before. There's a third piece now, and it's the clearest one yet: MONLAR's own ground investigations found heavy machinery already clearing and burning scrub forest inside the reserve, making way for a 150-megawatt solar park. This isn't just an activist's claim. Independent journalists walked the same buffer zone in March and found it themselves - smoke over freshly burned land, elephant dung in the ash. As much as 405 hectares of elephant habitat is slated for clearance. It's been split across 17 separate project approvals, each one small enough on paper that none individually triggers a full environmental impact assessment. Combined, they're one project. The Central Environmental Authority's own director general has conceded as much, and said the agency is now "engaging" with developers over it. It took a Supreme Court petition to force the government to gazette even basic management rules for the reserve, four years after it was declared. The petition came from the Centre for Environmental Justice and the same Walsapugala farmers who won this reserve in the first place - through an 86-day hunger strike in 2021.

The suspensions didn't hold, either. Hambantota's own district development committee voted, on the chairman's own motion, to halt thirty of these solar projects, citing land grabbed by politically connected businessmen under the previous government. That chairman is a governing-party MP. MONLAR alleges the projects restarted anyway, after five of the companies jointly funnelled roughly 14 million rupees through a farmers' organisation, disguised as funding for a boundary fence, with the same MP named among those who guided the process. Farmers now say he's gone quiet on how it happened; a reporter who tried to reach him for comment got no response. That's a serious claim against a named sitting politician, and it is still only that - an allegation, not a finding. No one has been charged, and neither the companies nor the MP have addressed it on the record.

The government disputes the underlying claim entirely. At a briefing in May, the Environment Minister said no solar project sits inside the MER itself, and a senior DWC official said three large projects nearby have been refused permits. That may be true of those specific plots. It doesn't explain what those journalists found on the ground two months earlier.

Move the elephants first, and the land opens up quietly, one "small" project at a time. The census didn't just make the drives politically defensible. It gave the government a chart to point to while it did something the chart had nothing to do with.

I said in part one that the 7,451 figure wasn't a measurement, it was a permission slip. Hambantota is what the permission slip buys.

You might also like: Elephants Are Going Thirsty in Yala.

Sources

•                Some ejected elephants return, but officials stick to plan - Sunday Times, Nov 23, 2025 (confirmed in full: Marasinghe's 7,451/"stable" quote, the 380-deaths admission, 2024's 388 toll, the unnamed DWC official's "failed concept" quote, and Chamikara's quote naming the port expansion, Chinese industrial zone, and Walsapugala solar clearance as the real drivers of the drive)

•                Sri Lanka's Elephant War: Investors Triumph, Giants Perish - Morning Telegraph, Nov 21, 2025 (independent corroboration of the same port/industrial-zone/solar framing, plus the 2006 Walawa Left Bank precedent)

•                Sri Lanka's Biggest Elephant Drive in Years Branded a "Slow Death Sentence" by Conservationists - Morning Telegraph, Nov 2, 2025 (confirmed: 21-day operation, ~80 officers, the MER's 2009/2021 history via Fernando, the 2006 Lunugamwehera precedent, "slow death sentence" as a real conservationist characterisation; does not confirm the "roughly 60 elephants" figure in this piece, which traces elsewhere)