The incident took place in the state of Odisha on Thursday, police said. Maya Murmu was in a pipe well pumping water in the village of Raipal in the Mayurbhanj district when the wild elephant appeared out of nowhere. Authorities said he had moved away from the Dalma Wildlife Refuge, almost 200km from Mayurbhanj. After being trampled, Ms Murmu was taken to hospital where she died from her injuries, according to Press Trust of India, police officer Lopamudra Nayak. It is reported that when the family members gathered for the funeral and were in the middle of the last rituals, the same elephant appeared, lifted Ms. Murmu’s body from the funeral pyre and pressed it again, as they mourned in shock. The family was only able to proceed with the ceremony after the elephant left. It remains unclear if the animal harmed anyone else present. Conflicts between elephants and humans are common in Odyssey. Intensive mineral activity in the mineral-rich state has increased human intervention in animal habitats, increasing the chances of encounters between villagers and elephants. A worrying trend in the state was also the increase in the number of unnatural elephant deaths. At least 1,356 elephants have died in Odyssey since 2000-2001, according to data provided by the state’s chief wildlife guard, the IANS news agency reported. At least 42 elephant deaths were recorded in the state in just seven months from April to October last year. Many other cases of human-elephant collision have been reported from other parts of the country. In March of this year, a woman was killed in a wild elephant attack in a forest in the Bilaspur district of the central state of Chhattisgarh. Her eight-year-old grandson was injured while trying to flee, police said. In May, a 40-year-old woman was trampled to death by an elephant outside her home near Gudalur, in the southern Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu.
