After 30 Years Of Project Elephant, Technology Helps Reduce Human Conflicts With This Heritage Animal

On 7 April, President Droupadi Murmu was in the Kaziranga National Park in Assam to inaugurate Gaj Utsav 2023, the annual festival in honour of the elephant. 

The occasion also marks the completion of 30 years of Project Elephant, the Indian initiative to provide technical and financial support to the states in efforts to manage and nurture their free-ranging populations of the Asian Elephant.

 The President used the occasion to highlight the problem of human-animal conflict and said “a barrier created in the natural habitat or movement of elephants is the root cause.

Therefore, the responsibility of this conflict lies with human society.”

Elephant corridors must be kept free from all man-made obstructions to facilitate their free movement, she added.

Assam with an estimated elephant population of over 5,700 elephants according to the last census undertaken nearly six years ago, has not announced its own counting exercise.

Such a census across all 16 Indian states with elephant population is crucial if the true impact of Project Elephant is to be understood.

Over the last 4-5 years, there has been a heightened awareness that the ingress of wild elephant herds into villages bordering their natural habitat or accidents involving elephants hit by trains in regions where railway tracks cut through forest areas, speak poorly of wild animal management systems. But things are changing.

A Manual For Avoiding Human-Elephant Conflict

A year ago, Project Elephant, along with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), brought out a very useful “Field Manual for Avoiding Human-Elephant Conflict” ( Full text here).

This has now created a uniform template for civic and forest management agencies to deal humanely and scientifically with such episodes whenever they happen.

Using Tech To Track Elephant Movement

With so many roads and railway lines passing through forested areas, some even slicing through designated wildlife reserves, preventing accidents to man or beast presents a technological challenge  that has seen some innovative  indigenous solutions, some  promising works in progress:

— The Central Scientific Instruments Organisation (CSIO), an institution under the umbrella of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in partnership with  WWF and WWI  has been working on two technologies which together help create an “Intelligent System for Elephant Movement Detection'': Seismic sensors embedded in the ground near railway tracks to pick up vibrations from a  moving elephant, coupled with thermal imaging cameras mounted on masts to  visually track elephant movement during day or night,  using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to enhance the image and recognise signatures specific to an elephant. 

Field trials of the two systems — EleSeisAlert and EleThermAlert — have been carried out in sections of the Rajaji National Park in Dehradun where rail lines pass, using domesticated elephants to identify and classify   the signals.

— The Tamil Nadu Forest Department and Indian Railways have jointly identified a 13 km stretch of forest in the Madukkarai areas of Coimbatore district and the Walayar forest on the Kerala border as most vulnerable to elephants straying onto railway tracks. 

They have put out a bid seeking companies who can offer an Artificial Intelligence-based system to detect elephant movements in three zones red, orange and yellow, of 50 metres each around the track.

Acoustic hooters as well as light-based signals placed on towers will alert forest guards as well as the nearest station master, if an elephant enters the zones.

— Tamil Nadu forest officials are also working with their counterparts in Palakkad, Kerala as well as with the railways, to explore the installation of thermal imaging cameras and possibly operating drones to track elephant movements in the border areas between the two states.

— In Odisha’s Keonjhar forest region, drones with thermal imaging cameras have already been harnessed to monitor elephant movements and behaviour, since late 2022.

— In Assam, home to India’s second largest elephant population, 11 elephant corridors have been identified and are being monitored in a novel way using existing infrastructure: Optical fibre-based cables run alongside the train tracks to provide communications between railway stations.

When elephants pass nearby, there are variations in the optical signal caused by the vibration of the earth.

The Northeast Frontier Railway uses AI to detect these signal changes and correlate them with elephant movement, to feed into an intrusion alarm system that alerts the drivers of trains.

— You are never too young to innovate: Last year an environment- focussed programme on CNN featured Seema Lokhandwala, a young computer scientist-turned-conservationist who founded the Elephant Acoustics Project — using acoustics to understand animals.

She described an elephant call detector which can  detect an elephant  from its sound — then emit a sound that  turns the animal away.

Elephants intrude into villages bordering on their grazing grounds, when such grounds are invaded by human activity or run dry of water. Such encounters where elephant herds destroy cultivated fields or even harm humans, occur too often to be ignored. Experts caution against development that encroaches on land that has traditionally served as animal habitat.  

 The Ongoing Saga Of Arikomban

But incidents like the ongoing saga of Arikomban, the rogue tusker accompanied by a cow and two caves, has reportedly rampaged through villages in the Chinnakanal forest of the Idukki district of Kerala, point to the continued friction when man encounters elephant.

It went all the way to a division bench of the Kerala High Court which rejected the Kerala government’s suggestion to capture the animal.

It constituted an expert committee which suggested the elephant be tranquilised, then relocated to the Parambikulam reserve forest in neighbouring Palakkad district. A satellite-based GPS tracker that the court ordered fitted to the animal is awaited from Assam. 

Local MPs and MLAs are challenging the decision as are tribals in the designated new refuge, who fear Arikomban and family will continue their destructive ways in their home. It is reported that a review petition has been filed.

The court asked the forest department pertinently, why it had acquiesced in allowing humans to settle in what was a reserve forest and elephant habitat 23 years ago and was now seeking to capture the creature because it was putting the intruding humans in danger.

Dr P S Easa, former scientist with the  Kerala Forest Research Institute, Peechi and a committed  conservationist writes: “There are problems of developmental projects leading to the loss or fragmentation of habitat and, in some cases, disturbance to the (elephant) population. It could be mines in Central India, the traditional practice of shifting cultivation in North east and Central India or Akhand shikar (traditional mass hunting for herbivores) in Central India and highways and other linear structures in the whole of the country.”

His paper “The Asian Elephant: Distribution and Conservation Challenges” (contribution in “Environment and Society: The India Challenge”, IndiaTech Books & Media 2013) is one of the most detailed resources available on the challenges facing the elephant, across Asia, with special emphasis on India.