The trade in India’s national heritage animal has changed shape, from elephant bazaars to interstate transfers and donation deeds. As elephants move across the country, gaps in their records can leave one fundamental question unanswered: where did they come from?
Radhika Bhagat
In March 2026, a young male elephant named Mohan arrived in Jaipur from Assam carrying papers that Assam’s chief wildlife warden says bore his forged signature. Rajasthan’s forest department seized the elephant, and an investigation followed. But the disputed documents tell us only about Mohan’s latest journey. They do not answer the more fundamental question: where he originally came from and how he first entered captivity.
Other cases show why that question matters. In 2016, forest officers stopped two young female elephants in Assam. Investigators said the animals had been caught in neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh; they had no lawful ownership papers, were not microchipped and did not appear fully tamed. Two years later, a man claiming ownership was arrested after a veterinary officer denied issuing the birth certificates produced for them. The case raised a troubling possibility: elephants investigators believed may have come from the wild could later be found with documents suggesting a captive history.
The trail may also cross an international border. Records from a Wildlife Crime Control Bureau investigation, reported by The Indian Express in September 2026, contain an account of a female elephant allegedly smuggled from Nepal into Kushinagar during the 2020 lockdown and subsequently sold for ₹40 lakh and then ₹70 lakh. The allegation has not been established in court, nor does the available record establish whether the elephant was wild-caught. But it points to the same vulnerability: once an elephant enters private possession, how securely can its provenance be reconstructed?
Together, the cases reveal where an elephant’s history can become obscured: between forest and captivity, across a border, and within the paperwork that permits it to move between owners and states.
Following the old elephant trade
For generations, anyone looking for the elephant trade could have started at Sonepur Mela in Bihar. Its Haathi Bazaar brought together elephants from different states and people seeking to acquire them. A Wildlife Trust of India study examined 77 elephants there in 2002 and reported that, according to their owners, most originated in Assam and a considerable number in Arunachal Pradesh.
Chaturbhuja Behera of the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau later examined the fair’s role in the trade. During a 2010 visit, he recorded 40 elephants. Five had transport permits for Uttar Pradesh and one for Gujarat, yet had been brought to Sonepur rather than following the destinations and routes specified in those permits. His investigation identified Sonepur as an important intermediary point between source states and buyers elsewhere.
TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, subsequently found 37 elephants at the fair in 2013, including six calves, and 39 in 2014, including five calves. Investigators said they could not find the required transport permits with traders they approached, while information gathered for its advisory suggested that many elephants coming from Assam were wild-caught. By 2016, only 13 elephants appeared, reportedly for display rather than sale. The question was whether the trade had ended or simply moved beyond the fairground.
Vivek Menon, Founder and Executive Director of Wildlife Trust of India and Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, describes the historical trade as largely moving elephants from the Northeast, particularly Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, towards centres of demand. Kerala and Tamil Nadu became important destinations for temples, festivals and processions; Rajasthan developed a market around tourism, most visibly at Amer Fort in Jaipur. Elephants in private hands have also been used for weddings, processions and other events.
Jose Louies, Chief Executive Officer of Wildlife Trust of India, says the open trade is considerably smaller today. But has the trade disappeared or simply become less visible? Increasingly, an elephant’s movement is recorded not in a Haathi Bazaar but through ownership certificates, transfer orders, transport permits and donation deeds.
The exception in the law
India declared the elephant its National Heritage Animal in 2010. It is listed in Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, its highest tier of species protection. Section 9 prohibits hunting Schedule I wild animals except under specified circumstances, and “hunting” includes capture. Section 11 allows the Chief Wild Life Warden to authorise action where an animal has become dangerous to human life or is disabled or diseased beyond recovery.
The law therefore places a strong restriction on capturing elephants from the wild. Yet elephants already in lawful captivity occupy a different legal position. Commercial sale is prohibited, but they may be privately owned and transferred under specified conditions.
The 2022 amendment to the Act specifically allowed a person holding an ownership certificate for a live elephant to transfer or transport it for a “religious or any other purpose”, subject to prescribed conditions. The amendment did not legalise commercial sale, but critics argue that the wider transfer provision creates an enforcement problem: how does one distinguish a genuine non-commercial transfer or donation from a sale presented as one?
Louies puts the problem plainly: “The law does not permit the commercial sale of elephants, but an elephant with an ownership certificate can be transferred or transported for a religious or ‘any other purpose’, subject to the prescribed permissions. The difficulty is in establishing what is actually happening behind the paperwork.” An elephant, he says, may be shown as a donation or transported while remaining in the original owner’s name. If money changes hands behind such an arrangement, proving it becomes difficult.
What the records reveal
Problems with the paper trail predate the amendment. In 2017–18, an Animal Welfare Board of India inspection team examined 103 applications concerning elephants used around Jaipur. The team included Suparna Ganguly, co-founder of the Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre (WRRC), a member of the 2010 Elephant Task Force and co-author of Gajah. According to records provided to the inspectors, Rajasthan’s forest department had filed FIRs against custodians of 61 elephants who lacked valid ownership certificates.
Further investigations exposed the central problem: once there is a break in an elephant’s documented history, it becomes much harder to establish where it came from and how it changed hands.
But paperwork is only one side of the trade. Demand is the other. In September 2026, five privately owned captive elephants, Durga, Hiralal, Shiva, Rupsing and Bijuli, were proposed for transfer from Assam to religious institutions in Tamil Nadu. Their intended destinations included temples in Madurai, Vaitheeswaran Kovil, Rameswaram and Tiruvannamalai, and the Kanchi Mutt. Durga, just five years old, travelled nearly 3,000 kilometres to the Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple in Madurai. When the transfers were challenged, the Gauhati High Court declined to restrain those for which the necessary statutory clearances had been obtained.
The five elephants illustrate something easily missed when attention is confined to illegal capture and forged papers: supply persists because destinations continue to want elephants. Temples, festivals, tourism and private events have historically sustained that demand. Not every elephant moved to meet it has been illegally captured or traded. But where demand continues, establishing the provenance of every animal entering that chain becomes critical.
A register still awaiting answers
Since 2014, WRRC’s petition in the Supreme Court has pressed for an accounting of elephants in captivity. In 2018, the Court directed state chief wildlife wardens to identify captive elephants and check their ownership certificates. The ministry later reported 2,675 captive elephants, including 905 in Assam and 518 in Kerala. In August 2026, the Court cited 2,725. But without births, deaths, rescues, first registrations and transfers being reconciled animal by animal, the increase cannot tell us how many elephants entered captivity, or how.
There is another problem. The same order lists 1,678 elephants with private individuals, 47 with circuses, 96 with temples, 768 with forest departments, 63 with zoos and 332 with rehabilitation centres. Those categories total 2,984, which is 259 more than the stated national total. The order does not explain the discrepancy. Categories may overlap, or a figure may be wrong; the underlying records are needed to determine which.
Neither faulty arithmetic nor a missing certificate proves that an elephant was taken from the wild. But a national register should be capable of identifying every elephant it counts.
Ganguly believes DNA profiling and better documentation could substantially strengthen the system, while cautioning that neither is foolproof. States first need complete and updated databases, she says, and not every captive elephant has been microchipped. Microchips can potentially be removed and transferred; DNA provides a stronger biological identity, but even that depends upon reliable samples, records and a secure chain of custody.
The government says its Gajah Suchana application holds genetic, physical and ownership details for every registered captive elephant. In August, the Supreme Court asked whether DNA profiling of all captive elephants had been completed and entered in the app. That distinction matters. A national database can close gaps only if states first account for the elephants themselves and reliably link each identity to the same animal throughout its life.
For the authorities in Mohan’s case, that is the immediate test: produce his first lawful record, establish who held him in Assam, verify his identity and genetic profile, and account for every permission covering his journey to Jaipur.
Only then can the papers tell us more than where he travelled. They might finally tell us where he came from.
GFX
THE MISSING ELEPHANTS
2,725
Captive elephants
2,984
Total across categories
259
Unexplained Difference
- Private individuals: 1,678
- Forest departments: 768
- Rehabilitation centres: 332
- Zoos: 63
- Temples: 96
- Circuses: 47
