When an elephant with health card was given eardrops

NEW DELHI: Dusky and decorated, Champa winces and shuts her eyes as Dr N V K Ashraf cleans the pus oozing out of her ears. He wants her to lie down sideways to administer the eardrops. But that's easier said than done. Champa can be moody too.
An assistant holds her ear, another pins her down, occasionally prodding her with a stick when she attempts to get up.Her wrinkled forehead furrows deeply when they insert a tube into her ear and inject the medicine. When it's all over, an assistant strokes her head gently. “Theek hai beta, ho gaya,” he tells her.
A little sigh and a twitch of the feet is all the discomfort she shows. But that is enough to make everybody step back in alarm. Champa, after all, is a 35-year-old elephant.
Champa and eight other tuskers were at the Delhi captive elephant health camp in Wazirabad's Sangam Vihar on Thursday. The camp was organized by the Wildlife Trust of India and Project Elephant of the ministry of environment and forests.
According to the city's Elephant Owner Association, there are 18 licensed captive elephants in the city.
The camp is a small cordoned-off zone near what is commonly known as ``haathi ghar''. The city's licensed elephants live here. On Thursday they are a well-behaved bunch, standing obediently, all lined up with their mahouts, waiting to be examined by the doctor. All of them bear decorations in the form of lotuses and floral patterns in pink, green, blue and orange on their trunks, foreheads and large, flappy ears.
Ashraf feels hygiene is a major problem for the elephants. “Not only are their living conditions unhygienic, even the water available to them is unclean. Earlier, they lived near the Yamuna, but the river is too polluted now,” he says, treating one of his patients' who developed a septic wound on the forehead.
Sitting half bent on her forelegs, she grunts with every dab of cotton dipped in medicine.
“It's very difficult for elephants to sit like this. They're much more comfortable lying on their sides. They can lie like that for hours,'' says Ashraf, the chief vet at the camp and a senior director at the WTI.
Most of these elephants are routinely used in wedding processions and religious events in temples. Some have even carried bravery award winners on their backs in the 26 January parade in the capital.
``Most of these elephants are captured from Assam and are brought into Delhi and Jaipur via Bihar,” says Arjun Anavangote of WTI.
At the camp, the gentle giants are given a standard check-up along with de-worming medicines, a must for every adult elephant every six months.
They also get tail reflectors to make their night journeys safer.
Each elephant has a health card. Amongst other things, the card records their ``chip number,'' an identification for licensed captive elephants in the form of a microchip embedded in their necks.
``There are three basic health problems with captive elephants: eye infections due to dust and pollution, food-related ailments and external wounds. The elephants we've examined so far seem to be in good health. No serious problem as of now,'' says A N Prasad, director of Project Elephant.
Nonetheless, healthcare is sure a jumbo task.