Spatial and temporal patterns of human-elephant conflict and compensation in Nagaon District, Assam, India

Human-elephant conflict (HEC) threatens both biodiversity and rural livelihoods. Forest departments in affected districts hold decades of compensation-claim records, but these archives are seldom analyzed for the spatial and temporal insights they contain. This study analyses twenty-one years of compensation-claim records from Nagaon District, Assam, India (1999–2020) to identify the spatial, seasonal, and institutional structure of conflict, and to assess whether compensation is allocated in proportion to the burden it addresses. Getis-Ord Gi* and Local Moran’s I statistics were applied to 1,915 georeferenced incidents across 1,032 villages, and 1,788 records with complete financial data were examined using non-parametric correlation, Theil-Sen regression, and segmentation by policy regime. Conflict was reported in 241 villages (23.35%), with hotspots concentrated along the Karbi Anglong foothills and human casualty clusters localized in the northeastern part of the district. Incidents peaked in December (23.29%), coinciding with the Sali rice harvest. Property and crop damage together accounted for over 88% of claims but under 28% of disbursed funds, while human fatalities represented 6.26% of claims and 68.37% of funds. Claim volume explained only 31.8% of the variation in payouts, with compensation rate revisions accounting for most of the remainder. Mitigation should be spatially targeted and seasonally adaptive, and compensation restructured into a tiered, need-based model that recognizes chronic livelihood loss alongside catastrophic outcomes.