IWN Original Report — Tuesday, 12 May 2026
Six hundred and twenty-three forest guards. Fourteen divisions and tiger reserves. One system that follows a wildlife crime case from the first FIR all the way to the courtroom.
That is the scale of what the Tamil Nadu Forest Department, the Wildlife Trust of India, and NTT DATA have rolled out across the state. The platform is called HAWK — Hostile Activity Watch Kernel — and it may be the most significant shift in how Tamil Nadu polices its forests in a generation.
What HAWK does
Wildlife crime in India has long had a documentation problem. Incidents get reported, cases get registered, and then the paper trail frays. A poaching case in the Nilgiris might be logged in one format; a snaring incident in Srivilliputhur in another. By the time the matter reaches a court, the evidence chain is patchy and the conviction rate reflects it.
HAWK is designed to close that gap. It operates through two modules. SHIKRA handles wildlife mortality — every carcass, every unexplained death, logged digitally and tracked. PEREGRINE is the offence management module, following a case from the initial complaint through investigation, documentation, and prosecution all the way to the final court judgment.
The platform was launched in 2025 and the training rollout completed in March 2026, covering divisions and tiger reserves across the state: Anamalai, Mudumalai, Satyamangalam, Kalakad Mundanthurai, Srivilliputhur Megamalai, and divisions including Dindigul, Kodaikanal, Karur, Coimbatore, Chennai, Villupuram, Salem, Vellore, Dharmapuri, and Trichy.
The people behind it
Training was led by Vidhya Chandran, IFS, Additional Director of the Tamil Nadu Forest Academy in Coimbatore, who also serves as the HAWK programme’s nodal officer. Coordination on the ground was handled by Manoj Kumar, Range Forest Officer. Sethu Gopinathan of WTI conducted the hands-on sessions, walking frontline staff through case registration, monitoring, and digital reporting.
The people being trained are the ones who matter most. Frontline forest guards are the first responders to every wildlife incident — but they have historically been the last to receive technical tools. Giving them a digital system that they actually understand, and that connects their ground-level observations to a prosecution outcome, changes what their work can accomplish.
Tamil Nadu, and why this is significant
Tamil Nadu holds some of India’s most ecologically important and pressure-tested landscapes. The Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve — the country’s largest contiguous tiger habitat — straddles its borders. Kalakad Mundanthurai is one of the oldest tiger reserves. Srivilliputhur Megamalai holds the last wild populations of the Nilgiri Tahr.
These are forests under constant pressure — from habitat fragmentation, from human-wildlife conflict, and from organised poaching networks that move across state lines. What HAWK provides is institutional memory: a record that does not disappear when a forest officer transfers, a case file that cannot be quietly shelved, a data set that tells you where incidents are clustering and why.
Whether the system delivers on that promise depends on what happens next — whether the data is actually used for analysis, whether prosecutions become more systematic, whether the conviction rate moves. Those are questions for the months and years ahead. The groundwork, at least, is now laid across 623 pairs of hands.