Bijlee, the ailing 58-year-old female elephant who collapsed on a road on June 11 after years of neglect, died early on Sunday.
Bijlee’s owners forced her to work for 50 years by begging on the streets of Mumbai and Thane and standing at weddings, paying little attention to her health or diet. She had even sustained injuries in an accident. After she collapsed in Mulund, top veterinary doctors made their best efforts to save the injured Bijlee, who also suffered from obesity due to bad diet, degenerative joints and osteoporosis, but they failed.
After Bijlee fell fatally ill, even actor Amitabh Bachchan had tweeted several messages and posted on his blog, highlighting the elephant’s miserable condition.
The forest department grants licence to privately own elephants only on a condition that the animals will not be made to work at weddings, but Bijlee was rented out to such functions. In 2008 it had been reported how Bijlee, then known by her alias Ramkali, had to walk over 100 km to Alibaug to attend a wedding of an MLA’s son. On her way back to Mumbai, she fell in a ditch and a crane could pull her out after nine hours. The owners also used several aliases—Ramkali and Ramu-—to hoodwink forest officials.
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