KATHMANDU, JUNE 29 In Udayapur, six families woke up to find their homes destroyed. In Jhapa, farmers have abandoned their rice fields to spend their days chasing elephants away from their villages. Across Nepal's eastern belt, the monsoon planting season has been overtaken by a more immediate crisis, wild elephants. A herd of wild elephants entered the Kumang Lamachaur area of Chaudandigadhi Municipality-7 in Udayapur overnight, destroying six wooden homes with thatched roofs belonging to local families including those of Buddhiman Rai, Radha BK, Roshan BK, Bam Bahadur BK, Bir Bahadur Magar and Dil Bahadur Magar, among others. 'When the elephants came into the village at night, we had to run to save ourselves,' said local resident Pushpa Rai. Chaudandigadhi Municipality has since set up a temporary safe area for the displaced families. A police team has been deployed in the area, and the herd, believed to have come from the Koshitappu Wildlife Reserve, is currently roaming forests near Lamachauri and 45 Chowk. Further east in Jhapa, residents of Bahundangi in Mechinagar-4 have been living in fear for weeks as a herd of 40 to 50 elephants, including calves, crosses from India daily and takes up residence in the area's tea gardens and thickets. The presence of calves has made the herd more aggressive than usual, and parents in the village have stopped sending their children to school for fear of encountering the animals on the road. Instead of transplanting rice in the muddy fields of Asar, farmers are spending their days in groups, using sirens and noise to push the herd back, a measure that has proved only temporary. Ward Chair Arjun Karki of Mechinagar-4 said local youth, Nepal Police and Armed Police Force personnel have been working continuously to drive the elephants back toward the border. But he was candid about the limits of local action. 'This problem cannot be solved by local government alone. The federal government must take concrete steps,' he said. Local resident, Nilkantha Tiwari, who have been facing similar situation for a long time, put it more bluntly. 'We submitted a memorandum through the Chief District Officer and the Chief Minister, even reaching the Prime Minister, asking for intervention. But no one listened,' he said. The conflict in Bahundangi is not new. The area sits along a centuries-old natural elephant corridor connecting Assam and West Bengal in India to the Koshitappu Wildlife Reserve in Nepal, a migration route that has existed for generations. As human settlements expanded and forests were cleared, the corridor narrowed, pushing elephants increasingly into farmland and villages. Electric fencing installed at great cost along the border has deteriorated in many places, and elephants have learned to find new ways through, using tree branches to pull down wires or topple poles. Conservation experts point to a compounding set of drivers: insufficient natural food sources like bamboo and banana within forest areas draws the animals toward stored grain and standing crops in villages, making the pull of human settlements increasingly difficult to counter. Local efforts; sirens, noise, temporary drives, address the symptom but not the cause. A durable solution, analysts say, will require cross-border coordination between Nepal and India to restore and manage the historical elephant corridor, alongside immediate measures including fencing repairs, heightened local security and guaranteed compensation for affected farmers. Without that, communities across the eastern Terai and foothills face the prospect of another season in which the arrival of the monsoon brings not just the promise of harvest, but the certainty of unwelcome visitors at the door. (With inputs from RSS)