The Asian elephant is a highly mobile, social mammal. A male elephant's home range - the area it uses for food, water and shelter - typically spans 50 to 300 square kilometres, and expands further where resources are scarce. Studies by the National Centre for Biological Sciences and the Wildlife Institute of India show that this movement is shaped strongly by the seasonal distribution of food and water; elephants move into Kerala during the dry months, drawn to the moister forests of the Western Ghats. A corridor is the strip of habitat that links two larger elephant-bearing patches and makes such movement possible. Corridors do more than carry animals from one forest to another: they permit genetic exchange between otherwise isolated populations, which maintains genetic diversity, and they give herds seasonal access to food and water, which in turn reduces the crop raiding that brings elephants into conflict with people. The Court's reasoning inverts the argument States have used - blocking a corridor to protect crops tends to increase, not reduce, the pressure on farmland.

Each landscape is losing connectivity in a different way. The Western Ghats, once a largely continuous elephant habitat, is fragmenting under changing land use, coffee and tea plantations, invasive plant species and farm fencing - a concern flagged in the latest all-India elephant population estimation report. In the Shivalik and Brahmaputra plains the drivers are linear infrastructure: railway lines, roads and power transmission. Central India and the Eastern Ghats present the hardest problem, because elephant numbers there have risen steadily since the mid-to-late 1980s while habitat has shrunk. Movement in that landscape began with drought linked to El Nino in what was then southern Bihar and intensified with iron ore mining in Jharkhand and Odisha; over the past two decades elephants have pushed into Chhattisgarh and further into Umaria and Shahdol in Madhya Pradesh and Gadchiroli in Maharashtra. This is why a fresh survey matters - the 2023 map is already being overtaken by animals colonising new ground.