new delhi with india reporting a huge number of cases of humanelephant conflict every year the union environment ministry has released a comprehensive guideline to mitigate such conflicts through scaling up multiple technological interventions including wider use of drones solar electric fence and sensorseach year humanelephant conflict results in about 500 human deaths and damage to thousands of houses and millions of hectares of crops while over 100 elephants die due to human activities such as poaching for ivory or meat poisoning electrocution and collision with trainsto manage conflicts and avoid loss of valuable lives of both the humans and elephants it is important to strengthen the humanelephant coexistence said the union environment minister prakash javadekar while releasing a booklet on best practices of humanelephant conflict hec management in india on monday he said efforts are in full swing to provide food and water to the animals in the forests itself to deal with the growing humananimal conflict casesglobally wild asian elephants are present in 13 countries the current population estimates indicate that there are about 5000060000 asian elephants in the world more than 60 of the global population of asian elephants is in indiathe booklet is a pictorial guide of a variety of management inventions successfully adopted by the elephant range states and serves as a reference manual for adoption of the best possible sitespecific mitigation measures that can be adopted to reduce humanelephant conflicta national web portal on humanelephant conflict called surakhsya for managing the conflicts on a real time basis was also launched on the occasion itll help in setting data collection protocols data transmission pipelines and data visualization tools to enable policymakers to leverage hec data for policy formulation and for preparation of precise action plans for mitigation of conflicts at present the beta version of the portal is launched for data testing before the pan india roll out for adoption by the states which is likely to be done before year end said the ministry in a statement