While there are obvious concerns about this technology being used to poach elephants (though there's less ivory poaching in India due to a variety of factors), I'm a proponent of the use of this...
While there are obvious concerns about this technology being used to poach elephants (though there's less ivory poaching in India due to a variety of factors), I'm a proponent of the use of this technology as an early warning system for communities that are impacted by crop-raiding, territorial males, and bratty adolescent herds. Combined with community education on elephant-human prevention, this has worked really well in trial locations in Africa and I'm not immediately aware of why there would be any difference in applying it to India.
Now that the conservation industry is able to afford satellite tracking collars instead of radio-tracking, and the longevity of batteries on the collars has improved immensely, this can be an effective near-term and medium-term measure to protect humans from wildlife and also empower, pretty literally, community governments (chiefs, village elders, etc.) to be responsible for the welfare of their people and also to take an active interest in understanding the behaviors of the wildlife around them. That last part is crucial because of how many people in rural India and remote parts of Africa are actually internally displaced persons and, while they may have a proud cultural heritage to fall back on, they don't have the sorts of teachings passed down to them that might be present in fictionalizations of their ancestors living in harmony with megafauna.
While there are obvious concerns about this technology being used to poach elephants (though there's less ivory poaching in India due to a variety of factors), I'm a proponent of the use of this technology as an early warning system for communities that are impacted by crop-raiding, territorial males, and bratty adolescent herds. Combined with community education on elephant-human prevention, this has worked really well in trial locations in Africa and I'm not immediately aware of why there would be any difference in applying it to India.
Now that the conservation industry is able to afford satellite tracking collars instead of radio-tracking, and the longevity of batteries on the collars has improved immensely, this can be an effective near-term and medium-term measure to protect humans from wildlife and also empower, pretty literally, community governments (chiefs, village elders, etc.) to be responsible for the welfare of their people and also to take an active interest in understanding the behaviors of the wildlife around them. That last part is crucial because of how many people in rural India and remote parts of Africa are actually internally displaced persons and, while they may have a proud cultural heritage to fall back on, they don't have the sorts of teachings passed down to them that might be present in fictionalizations of their ancestors living in harmony with megafauna.