Chhattisgarh’s Udanti-Sitanadi Tiger Reserve was, until recently, unfamiliar territory for elephants. Roughly 90% of the animals now present in the state migrated from Odisha, whose forests can sustain only about 1,500–2,000 elephants — a ceiling the population has crossed, pushing displaced herds toward Jharkhand, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh. As new arrivals searching for territory, these herds are more unpredictable and aggressive than native populations, and local communities had little experience managing their presence.

Varun Jain, a 2017-batch IFS officer and civil engineering graduate of IIT Roorkee, took charge of the reserve in February 2023. Within two months, a male elephant that had split from its tracked herd killed three people in 24 hours — a turning point that convinced him the existing warning system was too slow. At the time, the department relied on Munadi, a traditional drum-and-announcement system, a WhatsApp group, and manual mapping in QGIS, an open-source GIS tool. Every alert required an officer to plot a herd’s location by hand and estimate which villages lay in its path — too slow to keep pace with fast-moving animals.

Automating the Alert

Jain’s team partnered with a technology firm to automate this workflow, resulting in the Chhattisgarh Elephant Tracking and Alert System, branded “Gajsanket,” launched in 2023. Foot-patrol teams — known locally as Hathi Mitra Dal, or “elephant friends” — use ODK (Open Data Kit), a free, open-source data-collection app, to log a herd’s GPS location, size, behaviour, feeding signs and any crop or property damage. Since network coverage is poor deep in the forest, entries are stored offline and synced automatically once a connection is available.

Once uploaded, a cloud server draws a 5–10 km buffer around the herd’s location — the radius adjusts to the animals’ speed — and checks it against registered villages inside that zone. Villagers need not install anything; registering a phone number and location with their forest guard is enough to receive automated voice calls, SMS and WhatsApp alerts in Hindi. Munadi drumming continues as a manual backup for residents without phones or network access.

Notably, the system does not use radio collars: field experience, echoed by Odisha’s and Karnataka’s forest departments, shows elephants frequently damage or shed collars within three to four months. Instead, Gajsanket’s accuracy depends entirely on trained foot patrollers tracking dung, footprints and browsed vegetation each morning, then following herds at a safe distance through the day. With three years of accumulated movement data, the system can now forecast a herd’s next-day location with meaningful probability, and has helped identify 10–12 recurring elephant corridors — insights used to plan bamboo and fruit-tree plantations, ponds and grasslands that keep elephants inside preferred habitats and away from villages.

Measurable Impact

The results are stark. Udanti-Sitanadi recorded no human or elephant casualties for 21 months after rollout, and only two in three years — in both cases the villagers had already been alerted. Conflict incidents in the reserve fell from 445 cases in 2022–23 to 107 in 2024–25, with compensation payouts dropping from roughly ₹79 lakh to ₹19 lakh; nearby Katghora division saw cases fall from 682 to 149, with compensation down from ₹132 lakh to ₹42 lakh. Statewide, the app had triggered around 60 lakh alerts by September 2025, and Jain estimates a 60–70% drop in conflict since launch — though he credits the app with only 20–30% of this, with the rest coming from parallel efforts such as clearing roughly 750–950 hectares of forest encroachment and arresting over 500 poachers and timber smugglers in three years.

The system is also inexpensive: about ₹3 lakh to develop statewide, with recurring costs of roughly ₹2 lakh per district per year for messaging and cloud hosting. That affordability, plus similar forest department structures across states, has driven adoption in Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Odisha, Karnataka and Tripura, with Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand also receiving guidance from Jain’s team. The initiative has won the Chief Minister’s Excellence Award for Good Governance and Innovation (2025), the Eco Warrior Award (2024), and a National Hackathon on Human-Wildlife Coexistence hosted by the Wildlife Institute of India and MoEFCC (2025), with coverage in The Times of India, Down To Earth, Hindustan Times and The Better India.

What’s Next

Planned upgrades include mapping railway lines and electricity infrastructure into the app to warn train operators and power-line staff of nearby herds, an integrated compensation module for crop, human and cattle losses (targeted for February 2026), and experimental vibration sensors to detect elephants’ low-frequency seismic signals from several kilometres away — potentially warning villages before a foot patrol even makes contact. Jain is emphatic that technology alone cannot solve human-elephant conflict: without sustained habitat protection and anti-poaching enforcement, alerts merely manage a symptom rather than the cause. Gajsanket’s lesson for other states is less about the software than the model behind it — a low-cost, offline-capable data pipeline built around the daily work of trained foot patrollers, which technology simply makes faster to act on.