World Elephant Day: In a country of fewer than 300 wild elephants, every death matters

For centuries, elephants have roamed the forests and hills of what is now Bangladesh. Today, their presence has been reduced to a few pockets in the country's southeast and northeast, and their future increasingly depends on whether people can make room for them.

Bangladesh's last detailed national elephant survey, conducted between 2013 and 2016 by the Forest Department with support from IUCN Bangladesh and other partners, estimated 268 resident wild elephants. Another 93 migratory elephants were estimated to move through the country, while 96 more were living in captivity.

The numbers are minuscule compared with elephant populations elsewhere. Botswana, home to the world's largest elephant population, had an estimated 131,909 elephants in 2022. Zimbabwe had about 65,028 and Tanzania around 60,000.

But a direct comparison with those African nations can be misleading. Bangladesh's elephants are Asian elephants, a different species altogether, and Bangladesh is one of only 13 Asian elephant range states. What the numbers do reveal is the sheer scale of the challenge Bangladesh faces in keeping its elephants alive.

A population on the edge

The Asian elephant is classified as Endangered globally. In Bangladesh, it is Critically Endangered. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) says the country's resident elephants are concentrated in southeastern forest areas, while migratory elephants also enter parts of the northeast from neighbouring India and Myanmar.

The 2013–16 survey found that the country's potential elephant range covers only about 1,518 square kilometres, roughly 1% of Bangladesh's total area. It also mapped 12 important elephant corridors and 57 transboundary crossing points – routes elephants have used for generations to move between feeding, watering and resting grounds.

When those routes disappear, elephants do not simply stop moving. They enter farms. They cross roads. They approach settlements. That is where one of Bangladesh's biggest conservation problems begins.

When forests and villages collide

Human-elephant conflict has become the country's most serious elephant conservation challenge, according to the Asian Elephant Specialist Group's 2025 report on Bangladesh.

Agriculture and human settlements have expanded around elephant habitats, while infrastructure development has fragmented traditional routes.

In southeastern Bangladesh, researchers have pointed to infrastructure projects and economic zones built in or around elephant corridors as contributors to the problem.

A 2026 Mongabay investigation found that a 103-kilometre railway between Chattogram and Cox's Bazar passes through three protected areas – Chunati Wildlife Sanctuary, Fasiakhali Wildlife Sanctuary and Medhakachhapia National Park – where almost half of the country's resident elephants live.

The northeast faces a different problem. Some elephants traditionally cross the Bangladesh-India border as they migrate between forests, but fencing along parts of the border has disrupted these routes, leaving some migratory elephants trapped inside Bangladesh.

For elephants, a forest without a corridor is effectively a fragmented forest.

A deadly decade

The consequences have been devastating. According to Forest Department data cited by Mongabay, at least 148 elephants, including resident, non-resident and captive animals, were killed in Bangladesh between 2017 and 2025. Three more died in the first months of 2026, taking the reported toll to 151 since 2017.

Among the recent cases was a three-month-old elephant found dead in a protected forest in Bandarban. In January, a captive elephant died after being hit by a train in Sylhet. In April, an elephant in Rangamati died after being injured in a conflict with people. In July, a wild female elephant died in Teknaf after falling into a ditch following a landslide, rolling nearly 300 feet down a hillside before dying while receiving treatment.

These deaths illustrate that elephants in Bangladesh face threats from multiple directions, including direct conflict, electric fencing, habitat fragmentation, infrastructure projects and accidents. The Asian Elephant Specialist Group has identified electric fencing and other harmful deterrents as significant contributors to elephant mortality in the country.

The world is losing elephants, too

Bangladesh's crisis is part of a much larger global story. African elephants have been devastated by the illegal ivory trade; World Elephant Day estimates that about 100 African elephants are killed every day, primarily for ivory, meat and other body parts.

Asian elephants face a different set of pressures. Ivory poaching remains a threat, but habitat loss and fragmentation, human-elephant conflict and capture for captivity weigh just as heavily. World Elephant Day notes that Asian elephants are increasingly forced onto agricultural land in search of food as their habitats shrink, bringing them into deadly conflict with people.

The loss of elephants is also a loss for the ecosystems they inhabit. Elephants are often described as ecosystem engineers because their feeding and movement shape forests, open pathways and help disperse seeds. Their disappearance can therefore have effects far beyond the animals themselves.

96 elephants behind fences

Bangladesh's elephant story is not confined to forests. The national survey recorded 96 captive elephants – 42 males and 54 females. Of these, 16 were housed in government-managed safari parks: nine at Gazipur Safari Park and seven at Dulahazara Safari Park.

The figures expose another concern. Although captive elephants are required to be licensed under the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2012, only 35 of the 96 elephants identified during the survey were officially licensed. The Asian Elephant Specialist Group has flagged the resulting gaps in licensing, oversight and welfare.

Captivity can leave elephants with a very different set of problems, one that became visible this year in the case of Badsha Bahadur, an Asian elephant believed to be more than 50 years old. He was rescued from Patnitala in Naogaon and transferred to Bangladesh National Zoo in Dhaka. The former circus elephant arrived with chronic leg injuries and an infected broken tusk after years of neglect and is now receiving veterinary treatment and nutritional support at the zoo.

Badsha's story is a reminder that saving elephants is not simply about keeping them alive. It is also about how they are treated once they can no longer serve human purposes.

A difficult equation

Bangladesh has taken steps to protect its elephants. The country developed an elephant conservation action plan and established Elephant Response Teams in conflict-prone areas, which work with communities to monitor elephant movements, raise awareness and help reduce confrontations.

But conservationists say the response remains inadequate. Wildlife researcher and Jahangirnagar University zoology professor Monirul H Khan told Mongabay that the Elephant Response Teams are too few in number and their members work voluntarily, limiting what they can do.

Compensation schemes have also been introduced for people who lose family members, crops or property in wildlife attacks. But access to compensation can be difficult, particularly for people living or farming on government-owned land without formal ownership documents.

This creates a difficult equation. For a farmer, an elephant entering a field can mean the destruction of a season's income. For an elephant, that same field may be part of an ancestral route through a forest that has gradually disappeared. Both are trying to survive.

The question of coexistence

The most important number on World Elephant Day may not be the 131,909 elephants in Botswana, or even the 268 resident elephants in Bangladesh. It may be the number of safe places left for elephants to move.

Bangladesh's 2016 survey identified 12 elephant corridors. The 2025 Asian Elephant Range States Meeting report says these routes still lack adequate formal legal protection and remain vulnerable to encroachment and fragmentation.

That leaves conservation efforts facing a basic question: can Bangladesh protect its elephants without protecting the landscapes they need to survive? The answer will determine whether future generations see elephants moving through Bangladesh's forests, or only photographs of animals that once did.

For a country with fewer than 300 resident wild elephants, every death matters. And every protected corridor may matter just as much.