IWN Report — Wednesday, 19 August 2026

Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) has switched on a WhatsApp-based elephant alert network in a Uttarakhand village, designed to give residents and forest staff timely updates on pachyderm movement and help reduce human–elephant conflict by closing the gap between sightings and community awareness.

Early Warning

In Nawabwala, a village sitting between the Teen Pani and Kasurbhatkot elephant corridors in Uttarakhand, WTI’s local partner Nature’s Buddy has launched “Gaj Vaani” — a village-level communication network run through WhatsApp groups. Volunteers post verified sightings and safety alerts, aimed at reducing the time taken between when an elephant is spotted and when the people nearby actually hear about it.

The project has backing from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, which also supports Nature’s Buddy’s wider conservation work in the village. Through Gaj Vaani, local volunteer networks and student engagement now feed into the same alert channels as the village’s forest staff.

Tea Meeting

In West Bengal, the state’s forest minister attended a meeting on securing elephant corridors through the region’s tea gardens. WTI reported both as part of its World Elephant Day 2026 coverage, marked on 12 August.

The West Bengal meeting was held in Chalsa, Jalpaiguri district, where Manoj Kumar Oraon — West Bengal‘s Cabinet Minister for Forest Affairs & Environment — joined other stakeholders for a consultative session titled “Securing Right of Passage of Elephants through Tea Gardens, North Bengal.” WTI co-organised it with the Society for Protecting Ophiofauna & Animal Rights (SPOAR), a Jalpaiguri-based group that has worked as WTI’s local partner in the Dooars since 2018, keeping watch over elephant movement through the region’s tea estates.

Oraon spoke about balancing community safety with conservation. According to WTI, he said tackling human-elephant conflict requires collective action, and that the focus now needs to move toward practical solutions that let elephants and tea garden workers share the same ground. Estates in the Dooars have in the past strung razor-wire fencing to keep elephant herds out of cultivated gardens, fencing that WTI says has injured and killed elephants trying to cross it. SPOAR’s job as WTI’s Green Corridor Champion for the region is to keep pressing estate managers and local authorities toward less lethal alternatives.

Wider Picture

Both efforts form part of a larger, slower project. WTI’s Right of Passage initiative, begun with the International Fund for Animal Welfare in 2005, originally identified 88 elephant corridors nationwide; a second survey has since revised that count to 101. Of those, WTI says six have been fully secured and six more are in progress — leaving the greater part of the list still unresolved.

Back in Nawabwala, around forty students from the GIC Nawabwala school spent the day watching a short film on elephant conservation and shaping clay elephants of their own.

Sources: Wildlife Trust of India — World Elephant Day 2026 · Wildlife Trust of India — Right of Passage project · Wildlife Trust of India — SPOAR in the Dooars