India’s elephant warning system tackles deadly conflict

DHAWALPUR, India: In central India´s dry forests, community trackers hunt for signs of elephants to feed into an alert system that is helping prevent some of the hundreds of fatal tramplings each year.

Boots crunch on brittle leaves as Bhuvan Yadav, proudly wearing a T-shirt with his team´s title of “friends of the elephant”, looks for indicators ranging from tracks or dung, to sightings or simply the deep warning rumbles of a herd.

“As soon as we get the exact location of the herd, we update it in the application,” Yadav said, as he and three other trackers trailed a herd deep in forests in Chhattisgarh state, preparing to enter the information into their mobile phone. The app, developed by Indian firm Kalpvaig, crunches the data and then triggers warnings to nearby villagers.

There are fewer than 50,000 Asian elephants in the wild, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The majority are in India, with others in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. The usually shy animals are coming into increasing contact with humans because of rapidly expanding settlements and growing forest disturbance, including mining operations for coal, iron ore, and bauxite.

Mine operations in particular have been blamed for pushing elephants into areas of Chhattisgarh where they had not been seen for decades. “We have to be quiet so that there is no confrontation,” said Yadav, trekking through forests surrounding the Udanti Sitanadi Tiger Reserve. “We try and maintain a distance of 200 metres from the herd -- so that there is room to run,” added Yadav, who is one of around 250 trackers employed by the state forestry department.

Despite weighing up to six tonnes, an Asian elephant can cover several hundred metres in just 30 seconds, according to research published in the journal Nature. And as elephant habitats shrink, conflict between humans and wild elephants has grown -- 629 people were killed by elephants across India in 2023-2024, according to parliamentary figures.

Chhattisgarh accounted for 15 percent of India´s elephant-related human casualties in the last five years, despite being home to just one percent of the country´s wild elephants, government data show.

Authorities say the government-funded alert system has slashed casualties. In the Udanti Sitanadi Tiger Reserve area, elephants killed five people in 2022, a year before the app was launched. Among them was 50-year-old rice farmer Lakshmibai Gond, who was trampled while watching her fields in the state´s Gariaband district, her son Mohan Singh Gond said.