Elephant warning system tackles deadly conflict

In central India's dry forests, community trackers hunt for signs of elephants to feed into an alert system that is helping prevent some of the hundreds of fatal tramplings each year.

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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.