Guwahati
Karnataka, Assam and Tamil Nadu represent 59.29% of estimated 22,466 elephants in India, which revealed a report published by the Indian Institute for the Wilderness (Wii) in Dehradun on Tuesday (October 14, 2025).
The seven northeast states and part of the support of West Bengal 6,559 elephants that underline the critical role of the region as a fortress of elephants, a report entitled “Elephant Status in India: Synchronous estimate of the population of all India”, she said.
Wii officials said that from 2021 to 2025 it was carried out by means of a DNA-based method-similar to the method used for monitoring tigers, collaborators and prey-first in the country.
“Given the methodological changes, it is not comparable to past numbers and can be considered a new monitoring baseline for further research, monitoring and estimation,” the report read.
According to the findings, Karnataka leads with 6,013 elephants (4,792 to 7 235), followed by Assam with 4 159 (3,395 to 4 924) and Tamil over with 3 136 (2,688 to 3 585). With 13,308 elephants, these three states have almost 60% of the country’s total population.
Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Keraral (2,785 elephants) have 11,934 elephants together, which is 53.17% of the estimate of all India. These southern Indian countries are clubed under the landscape of Western Ghats.
On the northeast hill and flood landscape of Brahmaputra, which consists of ARUNACHAL PRADESH, ASSAM, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Northern West Bengal, offer elephants the second best habitat. This landscape is home to 22.22% of Indian elephants.
Two other landscapes – Shvivalik Hills and Gangetic Plains (Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar) and Central India and Eastern Ghats, include seven countries, including Andhra Pradesh and southern West Bengal – are 9.18% and 8.42% of the overall countries.
Three phases
The study was divided into three phases. The first phase included conducting ground habitats in wooded habitats across all states of tiger to determine which grids have the presence of elephants and related information.
The mobile application has been recorded abundance of Carnivore and Mega-Herbivore, the abundance of hoofs (hoofs), the number of corruptions, the position of vegetation through graphs of habitats and human interference. This information helped in modeling the occupancy of elephants.
The second phase included the evaluation of the characteristics of habitats and anthropogenic impacts such as vegetation coverage, forest patches, human footprint, distance to night lights and night light intensity. Over 6.66,977 km covered by the appraisers on foot was 21,056 manure samples for the third phase.
“After evaluating multiple covariates associated with elephant density – including distance from water, terrain robustness, normalized different vegetation index (April and November), proximity to night light sources and metrics of human tracks from ground surveys and Emoloval shivals and bat data and bat data As part of western data and data on Western ghances and bat data and within the western ghanes and bat data and in western data and data data and in the framework of tracked data and bats and bats and bats and data on the bat and the Hills-Gangetic Plains Landscape, ”said the report.
“In Central India and Eastern Ghats, the Meeting and the distance from the water were the most informative covariates. In the northeast, the level of elephants (including signs, observations and droppings) showed a strong predictive power to estimate elephant density,” the report said.
Published – October 14, 2025 22:05
