Why the Television Matters for Elephant Conservation

I enter the remnants of Nayak’s house. The old asbestos roof has been smashed to bits, the brick walls have been punctured through, and the iron skeletons of the pillars and beams lie exposed. I climb over rubble to enter his bedroom. On the floor lies his old television, cracked beyond repair. A band of five male elephants had entered his house in the dead of night, probably in search of stored grain, salt, or locally brewed alcohol.

Nayak, like 40 lakh people across the northeastern state of Assam, lives in a tea estate. These are typically large areas of tea plantations often spanning hundreds of hectares with small villages called “lines” that house resident workers and their families. Workers in these tea estates are paid a daily wage of Rs 233 along with access to some subsidised food and accommodation, making them one of the lowest income groups in the country, often below the poverty line. An Oxfam study in 2021 found that in the regular course of life, over a third of tea estate workers find themselves in recurrent debt. Unforeseen, catastrophic events like damaged property by elephants exacerbate vicious debt cycles and are challenging to recover from.

Human-elephant conflict across Assam has increased since 2000. This is potentially owing to large-scale deforestation and the high nutrition available in human areas.

Standing in the destroyed kitchen, Jibon, a villager who is part of the local human-elephant conflict management committee, taps my shoulder and painfully says, “They broke the TV as well…”, turning my attention to the broken appliance at our feet. Nayak and I stand mutely over the rubble and broken television. I think of economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Bannerjee’s work on understanding how poor people make decisions. In their acclaimed book, Poor Economics, they share a conversation from their fieldwork in remote Morocco. They ask Oucha Mbarbk, a man representative of the “classic starving poor” what he would do if he had more money — to which he replies he would buy food. And with more money? “Better-tasting food.” Despite this statement, in his house, where they were seated, there was a television, antennae, and a DVD player. Duflo and Bannerjee asked why he bought these expensive things when there wasn’t enough to eat — to which he responded, “but television is more important than food!”, a seeming departure from “rational thinking”.

However, this is not so. It is reflective of how people the world-over make decisions. The poor are no exception. The uncertainty of the future stokes the poor to spend on the few luxuries that make life more pleasant. These are not irrational expenses but rather, directed at maximizing well-being. Dipin from the neighbouring village lives in a mud house despite his aspirations to build a concrete home. But he chooses to spend a significant portion on celebrating Bihu, the local harvest festival, partly funded by taking back-breaking loans. Bannerjee and Duflo find that people across the world are more likely to spend on festivals when they do not have a television or radio, reiterating that people prioritise making life less boring. This is wholly logical, for people do not only look at increasing their longevity via increased nutrition, but also having something to live for, to look forward to. This is probably why the majority of the people in tea estates spend a disproportionately large sum, often equivalent to three months’ wages on smartphones. The fifteen-year-old television owned by Nayak cost him several months of wages and was his and his family’s rescue from everyday dreariness and monotony.

Acknowledging and addressing the critical role that these non-necessities play in the social development and well-being of communities goes miles for social justice and wildlife conservation. For instance, damages to essential goods like crops, buildings, and infrastructure are conventionally targeted by conservationists. Comforts like mobile phones and refrigerators are not. A stronger and more efficient compensation system by the state could help tide over such consequences of human-elephant conflict, where comfort goods are also compensated for or repaired. These could also be relatively inexpensive, being low-hanging fruit for improving the well-being of people and wildlife in shared spaces. A few months previously, in a house damaged like Nayak’s, Mano, a woman from the neighbouring village had the only photo of her father broken and being unable to get it scanned and framed made her feel “helplessness, and very angry and violent towards the elephants”. Acknowledging and acting on these non-necessity damages is not an alternative to supporting necessities but rather, very often a small addition that could have a disproportionately large impact.

Negative interactions with wildlife and “conflict” as it is thought of is much more complex than an equation between material loss and compensation. It is also moulded by their lived realities comprising personal experiences and non-material, emotional relationships. Actively addressing these conflicts with particular attention to the social and emotional conceptions of loss could play a strong role in shaping effective and just outcomes for people and wildlife.