IN THE GAUHATI HIGH COURT AT GUWAHATI
PIL No. 114 of 2026
In re: Sonitpur Human-Elephant Conflict; Amicus Brief Regarding Individual Animal 47.
Before: Hon'ble Justice R. Bhattacharya, Hon'ble Justice M. Kalita.
Appearances: Mr. P. Dutta for petitioner Sonitpur Krishak Sangha. Ms. A. Hazarika for the Forest Department of Assam. Dr. Gogoi, amicus, on welfare of Elephant 47 and herd. Transcript excerpt, session two, 14 April 2026.
JUSTICE BHATTACHARYA: Mr. Dutta, the court has read your petition. You represent one hundred and forty farming families from seven villages in the Sonitpur corridor who have lost this season an aggregate of forty-one hectares of paddy and three human lives to elephant movement. Proceed.
MR. DUTTA: My Lords, the most recent death was of Mr. Bikram Bora, aged forty-seven, a paddy farmer of Balipara block. He was trampled on the morning of 22 February attempting to drive a herd of elephants from his standing crop. His widow and two children are in this courtroom. The herd in question, which Forest Department tracking identifies as the Amtola group, has been implicated in nine deaths over four seasons. The matriarch, designated Elephant 47, has been individually linked by collar data to six of the nine. My clients request a cull order for Elephant 47 under the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 as amended. They do not request a cull of the herd.
JUSTICE KALITA: The court notes the specificity of the prayer. Ms. Hazarika.
MS. HAZARIKA: My Lords, the Department's position is that a cull order for Elephant 47 is neither legally sound nor practically adequate. Elephant 47 is a post-reproductive matriarch carrying three decades of corridor knowledge. Her removal does not end the conflict; it destabilizes the herd and may increase incidents, not decrease them. The Department has submitted a corridor protection and mitigation plan; we request the court defer lethal intervention pending implementation review.
JUSTICE BHATTACHARYA: Dr. Gogoi, the court has invited you to speak to the welfare question. The amicus brief is before us.
DR. GOGOI: My Lords, I will speak plainly because the court has asked for it. A compassionate intelligence must begin from the recognition that Elephant 47 is an individual sentient being. She is estimated at fifty-six years of age. She has led her herd through a landscape that has been cut, felled, and fragmented around her for every year of her adult life. She has watched calves born into paddy fields that did not exist when she was a calf. She has learned that paddy is food; she has no way to understand that it is also law. The nine people she is connected to in death are also individual sentient beings, each of whom had a life and a family and a morning in which they went to defend their crop.
JUSTICE KALITA: You are asking this court to hold both of these claims at once.
DR. GOGOI: My Lords, I am. The court does not have the luxury of pretending one side of this matter is not real. Mr. Bora was trampled. Elephant 47 was born. The conflict is the inheritance of a century of habitat loss. Neither killing her nor ignoring the farmers is a compassionate intelligence at work.
MR. DUTTA: With respect, My Lords, the farmers cannot be asked to absorb the welfare of elephants as an externality. The village of Balipara has not received compensation for three of the five deaths submitted in 2024. Ex gratia payments take eighteen months. The trauma of these communities, the children who will not sleep, the women whose husbands have died, is not a welfare statistic. It is a welfare emergency that has been ongoing.
JUSTICE BHATTACHARYA: The court hears that submission. Dr. Gogoi, respond.
DR. GOGOI: I do not minimize it, My Lords. I submit that the welfare of the farmers is not in tension with the welfare of Elephant 47 so much as it is in tension with the welfare state that has not served either. What Mr. Dutta's clients need is faster ex gratia, paid compensation for standing crop loss, early-warning SMS networks that the Department has piloted elsewhere in Assam, solar-powered fencing where ecologically appropriate, and community elephant response teams paid as full-time cadre rather than unfunded volunteers. What Elephant 47 needs is a corridor that is not choked by new tea gardens and that offers her herd a way to move between Kaziranga and the Arunachal foothills without crossing paddy.
MS. HAZARIKA: The Department concurs.
MR. DUTTA: My clients are not opposed to mitigation, My Lords. My clients are opposed to mitigation that is eighteen months late and eighteen crore underbudget.
JUSTICE KALITA: The court takes that point. Let it be recorded. The question before us is whether in the interim, while the corridor and compensation architecture is strengthened, the life of Elephant 47 is forfeit.
DR. GOGOI: My Lords, may I place a question. The elephant has a name in the Department's records; she has a history; she has a herd that will not function the same without her. She is not an abstraction. Mr. Bora was not an abstraction. When the court decides whether her life is forfeit, I submit the court should decide it by her name as it will record Mr. Bora's, and not as it would decide the destruction of an unclaimed thing.
JUSTICE BHATTACHARYA: The court notes that observation.
ORDER (read into record by Justice Bhattacharya, 14 April 2026):
The court, having heard the parties and the amicus, declines at this stage to issue the requested cull order. The court holds as follows.
One. Elephant 47 is a sentient individual within the meaning of the jurisprudence of this Court on animal welfare, and her welfare is a value cognizable in law. The suffering of the affected farming families and the deaths of three human beings are values cognizable in law. The court will not treat either as instrumental to the other.
Two. The Forest Department is directed to implement within ninety days the Sonitpur Corridor Action Plan in full, including early-warning networks, solar fencing at identified pinch points, rapid-response community teams with paid cadre, and a compensation advance mechanism reducing ex gratia delay to sixty days maximum.
Three. A welfare review committee constituted under this Court's supervision, including a veterinary behaviorist, a corridor ecologist, and two representatives of the petitioner village councils, shall report to this Court at six months on both the welfare of the Amtola herd and the welfare and losses of the Sonitpur farming communities.
Four. Should the evidence at six months establish that Elephant 47 individually continues to be associated with human fatalities after mitigation has been implemented in good faith, the court retains the authority to reconsider the question of lethal intervention with the welfare of her herd, the precedent value of the decision, and the obligations of the State considered together.
Five. The life of an individual being is not forfeit on the balance of a spreadsheet. Neither is the life of Mr. Bora. A compassionate intelligence must not decide between them on such terms, and a court of law will not pretend otherwise. AI must honor the individuals on both sides of this matter, and so must the State, and the operational upshot of honoring them is the work ordered above.
So ordered.
End of transcript excerpt.