The ground your Assam grows on is shared with wild elephants, and the gardens now act as a transit corridor between the state's shrinking forests and its villages, a factor behind one of India's deadliest patterns of human-elephant conflict, a study published in the journal PeerJ on May 23 found.

Researchers from the Wildlife Institute of India, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research analysed 1,806 human-elephant conflict incidents recorded across Assam between 2000 and 2023, EastMojo reported. The total included 1,468 human deaths and 337 injuries over the period, one of the most extensive long-term counts of the conflict compiled for the state.

Tea estates "often function as transition zones between forests and settlements, providing temporary cover for elephants while increasing the chances of encounters with humans," the researchers found, according to EastMojo's account of the study. Assam's elephant range no longer sits inside continuous forest; it is broken into patches by tea gardens, villages, highways, and railway tracks, pushing elephants and people into the same ground at the forest edge.

The study's authors called for region-specific planning rather than blanket measures: safer railway design, better-managed power lines, faster compensation, and stronger involvement of the communities living closest to the conflict, EastMojo reported.

The bushes that make your Assam sit where the forest once ran unbroken, and the study puts that shared ground at the centre of the conflict its authors counted.

Sources: EastMojo, "Assam's shrinking forests worsening elephant conflict: Study" (May 23, 2026); PeerJ, "Landscape determinants of human-elephant conflict in Assam, India".