When: 08 August, 2017
Where: Elephant Village, Jaipur
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The world’s third elephant village, popularly known as 'Haathi Gaon' in Jaipur, Rajasthan, has now been taken over by the Rajasthan forest department. While the forest department has recently introduced an entry fee for tourists visiting the Elephant Village with effect from 08 August, 2017. The entry so far has been free of cost. The amount collected will be used for the welfare of the elephants.
The village has so far been under the Rajasthan Tourism Department. The premises of the Amber Palaces, some 15 kms from Jaipur city, has maximum number of India’s elephants in captivity. The pachyderms are used for joy rides to the Amber Fort and back. On the first day, after the entry fee was announced, around 55 foreign tourists and 53 domestic tourists visited Elephant village and paid for the entry.
A housing project for a 100 elephants and their Mahouts, the Hathi Gaon (or elephant village) is situated at the foot of the hill of the Amber Palace and Fort near Jaipur. The design involved first structuring the landscape first to create a series of water bodies to harvest the rain runoff, as this is the most crucial resource in the desert climate of Rajasthan. The idea of the site planning was to mold a structure and system that would help regenerate the landscape in a decade to approximate the tropical landscapes that are the natural habitat for elephants and open to viewing for tourists and visitors.
