The Use of Elephants for Logistics in India

Abstract

Elephants played an essential and important role in ancient history for various purposes in wars, logistics, moving heavy loads and also worshipping, spirituals, entertainment, ivory, animal hunting. This article is specifically about the use of elephants for logistics in India. The dawn of the medieval era created a need for planning of transport and distribution of trade goods. As the carrying capacity of horses was not satisfactory for goods transportation, there was a steady increment in the use of elephants for transport. Incorporating elephants into transportation proved to have many advantages. Even the areas that didn’t have any road connectivity could be reached now. Also use of elephants led to a decline in loots, as this animal is difficult to take down. Thus elephants proved to be a safe and reliable tool for logistics. Elephants could not be used for any region as the maintenance of this animal requires a lot of water and food. Dry and drought regions were difficult to access using elephants. This is the base data to provide a network of usage of elephants for logistics. The details of use of elephant for logistics will be discussed in the article.