• Govt. begins legally clearing elephant corridors after decades of delays; only 3 of 16 identified routes gazetted
• Researchers question whether selected corridors reflect scientific evidence or political convenience
• Conservationists warn that gazetting alone will fail unless blocked lands are fully cleared, boundaries enforced, families properly relocated
• Studies suggest elephants use many of these landscapes as permanent home ranges rather than simple migration routes
• Real test is whether corridors remain protected and functional years after legal declarations, experts say

For the first time in years, the State has moved to legally clear elephant corridors rather than simply declare them on a map. 

Three routes in the south and east – Handapanagala, Wetahirakanda, and Koholankala – have been gazetted; families occupying blocked land have been promised alternative plots; and a new national action plan is being drafted to replace a framework that has remained largely unimplemented since 2020.

The Government is presenting this as a turning point after decades of failed fences and forced elephant drives. But researchers and environmental activists who have spent years tracking how Sri Lanka’s elephants actually move are asking a more basic question: are these corridors based on where elephants go, or on where it was politically convenient to draw a line – and once gazetted, will anyone ensure they stay clear on the ground?

Elephant conservationist and researcher Sameera Weerathunga said he did not see a scientific basis in the Government’s current process of gazetting elephant corridors. “The specific methodology used to release these corridors is unknown, as is the actual extent of the corridors and whether the people living within those areas have been relocated,” he said, describing the current approach as lacking practicality.

The announcement

In June and July, the Government executed what it called a high-priority policy package: the legal clearing and gazetting of three long-blocked elephant corridors in the south and east of the island, alongside the commissioning of a brand-new National Action Plan for the Management of Human-Elephant Conflict.

Following a Cabinet directive, the Ministry of Environment announced that the Handapanagala corridor in Monaragala – running from Handapanagala to Demodara, crossing the Menik Ganga up to the Yala National Park – had been approved for gazetting as a protected sanctuary under the Fauna and Flora Protection Ordinance. 

In the Wetahirakanda corridor spanning Monaragala and Hambantota, five long-standing licensed private land plots that had choked the 2002-declared nature reserve were reclaimed, with the Government providing alternative State lands to the occupants so that the area could be re-declared a functional wildlife corridor. 

In Koholankala, inside the Hambantota Wild Elephant Management Reserve, the State initiated compulsory acquisition of private land parcels blocking the corridor, with financial compensation offered to owners.

Speaking at a press briefing in June, Minister of Environment Dammika Patabendi said that the approach was being tailored to local conditions.

“We have to find solutions that are specific to each district. After this Government came into power, district-level elephant management committees were established. We discuss matters within those committees and implement solutions that are suitable for the respective areas,” he said. 

“We believe that by opening these elephant corridors, we will be able to reduce, to a certain extent, the human-elephant conflict, the number of elephant deaths, the number of human deaths, and damage to property.”

Deputy Minister of Environment Anton Jayakody described the initiative as part of a wider integrated programme launched under the direct guidance of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. 

“The human-elephant conflict has now reached a critical stage due to years of unplanned development in the country and the adverse impacts of global climate change,” he said, adding that the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) had been given additional human and physical resources, including assistant officers to maintain elephant fences and additional vehicles.

Jayakody said that work had also begun on restoring tanks and water sources inside protected forests, as well as on a habitat enrichment programme to remove invasive plant species and establish new grasslands. 

“We have already begun restoring tanks and other water sources in protected forests so that wild elephants can obtain the water and food they need without leaving the forest,” he said.

DWC Additional Director General Manjula Amararathna said that officials were continuing to identify similar migration routes across the country. 

“We are continuing to identify similar elephant migration routes across Sri Lanka and are also working to officially declare them. Restoring elephant migration routes, removing obstacles within them, and providing them with legal protection will help ensure their long-term sustainability,” he said, noting that construction of an electric fence at the Handapanagala–Demodara corridor was expected to begin within two months.

DWC Director U.L. Thawfeek confirmed that field inspections had been carried out in Wetahirakanda, where five families living in unauthorised settlements had been identified. 

“Alternative lands will be provided to them in order to completely free up the corridor,” he said, adding that fences were also planned on both sides of the Koholankala corridor, which is expected to connect a national park with an elephant management reserve.

Three out of sixteen

Officials at the briefing acknowledged that 16 major elephant corridors had been identified nationally, of which only three had so far been cleared under what the ministry calls the first phase, timed to coincide with World Environment Day. 

Human-elephant conflict has been recorded in 131 divisional secretariat divisions, and roughly 400 elephants and close to 100 people have died annually in recent years, according to figures cited by officials. DWC data places elephant deaths at 488 in 2023 – the highest recorded – falling to around 386 in 2024, with 2025 figures settling between 397 and 409.

Ministry of Environment Additional Secretary Udaya Kumara said that a 2020 expert committee report on the conflict was being reviewed. 

“We are reviewing the 2020 committee report on resolving the human-elephant conflict in Sri Lanka, taking into account the current environmental and ground realities. We are now making arrangements to submit a revised proposal with Cabinet approval, based on a new scientific approach, in order to provide a solution to this issue,” he said. 

The Cabinet approved scrapping the 2020 framework on 16 June this year in favour of an entirely new national action plan, to be prepared by a multi-stakeholder committee of scientists, ministers, and district secretaries and submitted to the President within three months.

What the science says

The credibility of the corridor approach rests substantially on tracking research conducted since 2008 by Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando and his team at the Centre for Conservation and Research (CCR), whose GPS and satellite telemetry data reshaped scientific understanding of elephant movement in Sri Lanka. 

That research found that Sri Lankan elephants do not migrate long distances along continuous linear paths, but occupy well-defined home ranges of roughly 50–150 square kilometres, to which they show strong fidelity – using small forest patches chiefly to avoid human contact rather than to pass through on a journey between distant parks.

A November 2024 case study of the Wetahirakanda corridor itself, conducted jointly by researchers from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, CCR, Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, and University of Ruhuna, found that elephants were present both inside and outside the corridor throughout the year. 

The study concluded that the 14.38-kilometre corridor functions less as a transit conduit and more as part of the resident elephants’ permanent home range – meaning that clearing it alone is unlikely to resolve conflict that is already structural and spread across the wider landscape.

Weerathunga argued that any credible corridor must be built on evidence of how elephants actually moved, not administrative convenience. 

“Elephants do not simply move between distant locations like Udawalawe and Kumana; rather, they occupy and frequent specific regions,” he said, pointing to seasonal aggregations in Minneriya and Kaudulla as an example of the shifting, localised movement patterns that genuine corridors needed to protect. 

He charged that corridors created for the convenience of people rather than the needs of the animals amounted to a “crime,” and questioned whether the newly gazetted areas had been correctly sized, whether elephants could be shown to use them, and whether they would remain secure for the next 10–15 years.

Paper versus reality  

That last question – security over time – is where the sharpest criticism has landed. Centre for Environmental Justice (CEJ) Chairman Hemantha Withanage said that 16 corridors had been scientifically identified and were, in principle, the ones the Government should be gazetting. 

In practice, he said, political considerations often overrode scientific ones: authorities tend to avoid corridors where there is local political resistance and instead gazette areas with less opposition, even where the scientifically identified route lies elsewhere, as he said had happened around Wandama-Demaliya.

Withanage was blunt about what gazetting alone achieved. “Declaring a reserve ‘on paper’ without physically removing and relocating the people living there is useless,” he said. 

He cited ongoing legal and physical disputes in areas such as Kebiliththa and Trikonamadu, as well as land in one case that had been declared a reserve in 2012 but where residents had remained – leading to a 2021 court case and an interim order that had, for four years, prevented cultivation without resolving the underlying occupation. 

The CEJ Chairman pointed to boundary disputes, often over markers on trees, rocks, or streams that communities contested, and to political promises made to residents by multiple parties suggesting they could remain in reserves and instead clear barren forest patches – a claim Withanage rejected outright, noting that human activity was prohibited in a forest reserve regardless of how sparse the vegetation appeared.

He pointed out that gazetting had been inconsistent for years, largely stalling around 2016 and after 2020, before resuming recently with more than 80 areas in process. But the harder part, he said, was not the paperwork. 

“Gazetting is the easy part; the difficult part is the cost. The Government must spend money to relocate people and provide for their needs,” he said, citing Nilgala, where more than 4,000 acres had been gazetted years ago but no physical boundary markers had ever been placed and nothing had changed on the ground. 

Even where officials and communities have reached uneasy compromises, the tension is visible. Withanage described a recent meeting  related to Kebiliththa, where the District Secretary and a local MP present had ultimately sided with the environmentalists, acknowledging the necessity of the court-ordered restrictions. However, he noted that such firmness on the ground was not consistent across the country.

A global comparison, an unresolved test

Meanwhile, the DWC pointed to India’s clearance of more than 100 identified elephant corridors and to transfrontier conservation efforts in Kenya and Tanzania as models of what unobstructed migration routes could achieve for both conservation and rural economies. 

Officials say the newly gazetted corridors will be paired with community-managed seasonal electric fencing around villages and paddy fields, rather than the long linear fences that both Government officials and independent researchers agree have failed in the past, along with satellite telemetry and drone monitoring to track elephant movement.

Whether that shift in method will be matched by a shift in enforcement is the question Weerathunga and Withanage both return to. Three corridors have been legally cleared; 13 scientifically identified corridors remain untouched. Compensation, relocation, and boundary demarcation – the elements both researchers describe as the actual work of corridor restoration – are only beginning, and have historically been where past efforts collapsed. 

As Weerathunga put it, the issue is a deep and complicated one that must ultimately be judged on data: whether these corridors are truly protected, whether elephants use them, and whether they will still be standing in ten or 15 years’ time.