Text Messaging Helps Elephants and People Coexist
December 29, 2015 - Technology is helping protect people from roaming elephants. Cell phones are ubiquitous in rural Valparai, India. And so are Asian elephants. Now the former are being used to keep people safe from the latter. Thousands of people in Valparai work on tea and coffee plantations that are nestled between protected areas—and act as elephant passageways. Since 1994, more than 40 people in the area have been killed in encounters with elephants. Research has shown that most of those deaths could have been prevented if people had had sufficient warning. That’s where the Nature Conservation Foundation’s early warning system comes in. The system began as a crawl on the local cable TV station and now also includes red indicator beacons and bulk text messages, alerting people who live and work in the area to the presence of elephants. The death rate from elephant encounters has dropped since the advent of the warning system, helping people and elephants coexist.
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An elephant early warning system saves lives in Tamil Nadu."
Dr. Ananda Kumar, Scientist, Nature Conservation Foundation:
You know India has the highest number of Asian Elephants and there are millions of people living close to or within the elephant landscapes.
Between 1994 and 2015, 41 people lost their lives in direct encounters with elephants. Because people did not know there were elephants so they were unaware of elephant presence.
Ganesh Raghunathan, Research associate, Nature Conservation Foundation:
The Valparai landscape is primarily a tea and coffee dominated landscape. But it is surrounded by large patches of protected areas—wildlife sanctuaries, tiger reserves. We have about 70,000 people residing in the Valparai region in about 220 square kilometers. And they are all scattered. They are not living together in small clusters. You will see a group of six families living in one place. A kilometer away you will see a group of six families.
Dr. Ananda Kumar, Scientist, Nature Conservation Foundation:
In between they have left certain forest patches without converting them into tea. And they provide food source for elephants and they provide as a halting station for elephants when they are moving through this open areas of tea. So historically the plateau has been used by elephants to move across these plantations to go into surrounding protected areas. When they moving through these tea plantation areas thats when they come into contact with people. Thats where an early warning could help people to avoid these surprise encounters. So what we noticed that if we can develop elephant information network here, we could have a better way of safe guarding people’s lives.
Ganesh Raghunathan, Research associate, Nature Conservation Foundation:
Most of the people who work in the tea estates have mobile phones these days. We update people about elephant presence through bulk messages - sending out text messages telling them where elephants are.
We have a team of four people, they track elephants everyday. So the moment we have information where all the elephants are in the landscape, we send out messages.
Dr. Ananda Kumar, Scientist, Nature Conservation Foundation:
So this has actually developed a kind of network system. So think of it this way, there are 70,000 people which means 140,000 eyes. So elephants can’t escape these eyes.
Geetha Kumari, Tea plucker (speaks in Tamil):
When we know that elephants are in the area, we do not work there. We pick leaves elsewhere where it is safe.
Lateef, Tea shop owner (speaks in Tamil):
We receive the SMS by 5 p.m. if there are elephants in our area, asking us to be cautious.
Ganesh Raghunathan, Research associate, Nature Conservation Foundation:
We also basically keep up to date with which are the herds, where are they moving about. We also look at communicating this information to the people. It could be the people who are working in the estates, the management, the forest department, just to keep everybody updated about where the elephants are in their region, so they don’t accidentally encounter these elephants.
Dr. Ananda Kumar, Scientist, Nature Conservation Foundation:
Before we started, on average three people used to die. Now it has come down to one. If the same average would have continued there would have been 19 more people who lost their lives. In this landscape, addressing the safety of people is a primary issue. We definitely need to look at the avenues that can actually facilitate the co-existence between people and elephants.
