The jungles of South India are burning. Not with fire, but with a weed.
Lantana camara, an ornamental shrub brought from Australia by the British in the 1800s, has now swallowed over 40% of forest undergrowth across the Western Ghats. Pretty purple-pink flowers hide an ecological catastrophe. And we are paying for it in blood.
How a Garden Plant Became a Jungle Killer
Lantana doesn’t play fair. It grows in dense, impenetrable thickets 6-10 feet high. It poisons the soil with chemicals that stop native seeds from sprouting. It tolerates drought, fire, and shade. Birds eat its berries and spread seeds for miles. One plant becomes a million in a decade.
The result: The forest floor dies. Native grasses, bamboo, and herbs that elephants, gaur, chital, and sambar depend on are choked out. In Bandipur, Nagarhole, and Wayanad, vast tracts that once grew nutritious fodder are now carpets of lantana. A 2023 Wildlife Institute of India study found lantana covers over 2.4 lakh hectares in Karnataka’s protected areas alone.
Starving Giants, Angry Streets
An adult elephant needs 150-200 kg of fodder daily. Grass, not leaves, makes up 70% of its diet. When lantana erases that grass, elephants do what any starving animal does: they move.
They follow old migration paths into coffee estates, paddy fields, and villages. They raid crops not out of malice, but desperation. Human-elephant conflict in Karnataka has killed 43 people in 2025 already. In Kodagu, three deaths in the last two months trace directly to herds displaced from forests overtaken by lantana. A planter in Virajpet was trampled last week while protecting his harvest. His family calls it murder. By a weed.
This isn’t just an elephant problem. Chital starve. Gaur lose grazing. Tigers follow prey into villages. The entire food chain fractures. Forest fires burn hotter because lantana is oil-rich and flammable. Native plants can’t recover after burns. The weed always wins.
Kerala Acts. Karnataka Watches.
The Kerala Forest Department saw the writing on the wall. Since 2021, under the ‘Lantana Eradication and Livelihood’ project, they’ve cleared over 12,000 hectares in Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary. They didn’t just cut it. They uprooted it, used it for biochar, handicrafts, and briquettes – turning a menace into income for tribal communities. Grass is returning. Elephant sightings inside forests are up. Conflict is down 22% in cleared ranges.
Kerala treated it like the emergency it is. Karnataka is still debating.
The Time for Reports is Over
Karnataka holds the largest contiguous elephant habitat in India. It also holds the most lantana. The math is simple: No grass, no elephants in forests. No elephants in forests, more deaths in Coorg, Hassan, Chamarajanagar.
Pilot projects won’t cut it. We need a war footing.Â
What Karnataka Must Do Now:
- Declare Lantana a State Ecological Emergency – Fund a 5-year, mission-mode eradication program across Bandipur, Nagarhole, BRT, and MM Hills.
- Uproot, Don’t Chop – Cutting lantana makes it grow back thicker. Manual uprooting before seeding, followed by planting native grasses, is the only method that works.
- Make It Economic – Copy Kerala. Train Soliga, Jenu Kuruba, and other forest-dwelling communities to make furniture, biofuel, and paper from lantana. Pay them to protect their own forests.
- Ban Further Spread – Stop lantana from being used as fencing in forest fringe villages. One garden hedge becomes a forest infestation.
Every day we delay, lantana takes another acre. Another elephant walks hungry into a village. Another family in Coorg lights a funeral pyre.
The deaths in Kodagu are not “man-animal conflict.” They are policy failure. The blood is not just on the tusks. It’s on the files that never moved.
Kerala showed it can be done. Karnataka must decide if it values its elephants – and its people – enough to do it.
About the Picture:
A lone elephant wading through dense Lantana camara, with the forest floor completely choked by those pink-orange flower clusters. No grass in sight.
This is what 40% of our protected forests look like now.
The visual says what the data does: when a 5-ton animal can’t find a blade of grass, it will walk into a village.
Prasad Bidapa
