The Odisha forest department is planning to fit radio collars on seven elephants in the state to track and prevent them from entering human settlements.
Context
The Odisha forest department is planning to fit radio collars on seven elephants in the state to track and prevent them from entering human settlements.
What is a radio collar?
- A radio collar is a lightweight belt fixed on an elephant’s neck.
- The device is fitted with a GPS device and the data is relayed real time on a computer or mobile app.
- A radio collar cost around Rs five lakh.
- The real time monitoring of data helps in early warning whenever the elephant is in the vicinity of a human settlement.
- The collars will be fitted onto three wild elephants of the Chandaka Wildlife Sanctuary on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar and four elephants of the Similipal Tiger Reserve in Mayurbhanj district.
Other States
- West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh and Assam governments had used the technique of radio-collaring herds in the past to avert increasing human-elephant conflict.
- Chhattisgarh was the first to radio collar elephants in India in October 2018.
Chandaka Wildlife Sanctuary
- Nestled on Khurdha uplands of ‘North -Eastern Ghats’ biotic region, Chandaka forest is a wildlife sanctuary since August 1982.
- Spread over 193.39 sq.km of rolling table land and small sprawling hillocks of Khurdha and Cuttack Districts.
Similipal Tiger Reserve
- Similipal Tiger Reserve, fourth largest tiger habitat in the country, is located within the Mayurbhanj District, in the Northern-most part of Odisha.
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