Manoj Rajan

Walk into any health insurance office in India and you'll find policies covering everything from your heart to your kidneys. Yet the one body part every Indian uses every day, our mouth, remains largely excluded from mainstream health insurance. Dental health (Freepik) That omission is more than an insurance gap, it is a public health blind spot with significant economic consequences.

But this conflict is not merely the result of one elephant entering one farm. It is a landscape-level issue driven by historical land-use change and habitat fragmentation. Elephants from Nagarahole National Park in Kodagu move through a diffused network of plantations and forest patches toward Bhadra Tiger Reserve in Chikkamagaluru, more than 100 kilometres away as the crow flies.