Government starts DNA profiling of captive elephants

The environment ministry has started DNA profiling of all captive elephants across India to prevent any kind of trafficking of pachyderms, ministry officials said.

The Centre, in collaboration with the Wildlife Institute of India, has come up with an app named Gajah Suchana to collect biological samples of captive elephants for genome mapping.

“An initiative has been taken by the ministry to map the genotype of all captive elephants in the country to prevent illegal trafficking of elephants,” said a senior official of the ministry, who asked not to be named.

He said that blood samples of elephants from some states including Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Tripura, Delhi, and Uttarakhand have already been collected. Some other states such as Kerala have also started the initiative.

States such as Karnataka, Kerala, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Tripura and Madhya Pradesh account for around 95% of captive elephants in captivity without ownership certificates.

“The problem arises when an elephant is exchanged or when an elephant is sent to some facility, we don’t know whether it is the same animal reflected in the ownership certificate. The document has no face or photograph of the animal. DNA is the only thing we can match. So, if every certificate has the animal’s DNA profile, it can be matched,” said a second environment ministry official, who asked not to be named.

The Centre submitted an affidavit in the Supreme Court in 2019 that said that there were at least 2,454 captive elephants in India then. Around 560 of these animals were with the state forest departments while around 1,687 were with private individuals, 85 in zoos and 96 in temples among others and the rest in circuses.

Of these, 660 captive elephants didn’t have any valid ownership certificate, according to the affidavit. Kerala and Assam account for over half of all captive elephants in the country.

“In some case it was detected that the tusks of captive elephants were sawed from the edge and sold off. If genome mapping is done every individual elephant would have an unique identity like our Aadhaar cards and it would be easy to identity any parts of the animal if it is trafficked,” said an officer of the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau who asked not to be named.

A similar initiative was taken up in 2016 for saving rhinos in the name of RhODIS or the Rhino DNA Index System, a wildlife forensics tool that was specially developed for investigating wildlife crime cases related to the rhino

The Union environment ministry along with Wildlife Institute of India (WII), forest departments of West Bengal, Assam and Uttar Pradesh and WWF India launched RhODIS India programme. The first case under the RhODIS India programme was investigated in 2017, when a horn was seized near Guwahati in Assam.

“Earlier microchipping was introduced to identify individual elephants where in a microchip with all details of the animal was inserted. It was easier to read with a scanner. But genome sequencing is more foolproof. It would, however, need a state-of-art laboratory,” said Raman Sukumar, , elephant expert and ecologist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru.