India's elephant warning system tackles deadly conflict
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.
'Line of defence'
"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 (220 yards) 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.
"She was caught off-guard," he told AFP. "The elephant ripped her skull apart."
Since the alarm system began in February 2023, just one elephant-related death has been recorded.
"Villagers provide their mobile number and geo-tag locations," said state forest official Varun Jain, who leads the initiative.
"They get calls and text messages when an elephant is within five kilometres (three miles)."
Announcements are also broadcast on loudspeakers in villages in key conflict zones as a "second line of defence", he added.
'Such a clever creature'
Residents say the warnings have saved lives, but they resent the animals.
"When there is an announcement, we do not go to the forest to forage because we know anything can happen," said community health worker Kantibai Yadav.
"We suffer losses, because that is our main source of livelihood and they also damage our crops," she added. "The government should not let wild elephants roam around like that."
Forest officials say they are trying to also "improve the habitat" so that elephants do not raid villages in search of food, Jain said.
The app requires trackers to monitor the elusive animals over vast areas of thick bush, but Jain said the alert system was more effective than darting and fixing radio collars to the pachyderms.
"An elephant is such a clever creature that it will remove that collar within two to three months," Jain said.
Radio collars would be usually fitted to the matriarch, because that helps track the rest of the herd who follow her.
But the elephants that pose the most danger to humans are often rogue bulls, solitary male animals enraged during "musth", a period of heightened sexual activity when testosterone levels soar.
"Casualties you see in 80 percent of the cases are done by the loners," he said.
"The app is to ensure that there are no human casualties."