An early warning system that has saved precious human lives and reduced damage to property in the Valparai plateau, home to second largest elephant population in the country, has bagged the prestigious Whitley Award, or the Green Oscar, for 2015.
Beginning 2002, Ananda Kumar, a scientist with Nature Conservation Foundation, began studying elephants in the fragmented landscape where large expanses of rainforest were cleared for plantations in the late 1800s.
The plateau is also home to about 75,000 workers, who often came in direct conflict with the elephants, mostly early in the mornings or night hours, as they step out for various reasons – driving the community into a fear psychosis.
“The early warning system, introduced in 2006, has three measures in place right now,” says Mr. Kumar. Whenever elephant movement is noticed, the hotline run by his team, receives a message and is immediately passed on to residents within a few km radius on a daily basis. Around 3,000 families are connected to this bulk SMS facility, he says.
Based on the database built over the years, information about elephant presence is also communicated as a crawl on local cable TV network. This reaches nearly 5,000 families, mostly in conflict-prone zones.
Additionally, there are mobile operated light indicators covering 220 sq.km, which is more than half of the plateau. “The average number of lives lost due to elephants has come down from three (2.8) per annum from 1994-2002 to an average of about one (1.2) for the period between 2003-1015,” says Mr. Kumar.
“It is a collective work as the efforts would not have been possible without the support of the Forest Department which has a Rapid Response Team to protect lives and property,” he says. The plantation companies and local people are also big contributors to the conservation efforts, he emphasises.
The elephants also attacked ration shops, noon meal centres and kitchens of households, leaving property damaged. In the last four years, the damage to property has declined by half compared to previous years. In fact, there are mobile ration shops now.
By empowering the local community with location specific information, Ananda Kumar and his team, including Ganesh Raghunathan, have turned zones of conflict into co-existence.
As a next step, Mr. Kumar and his team is in the process of collecting data and understanding the human-elephant relationship scientifically in Sathyamangalam region to reduce crop damage.
