Ooty: The introduction of ‘Smart Patrolling App (SPA)', a new era tool to assist foresters and anti-poaching staff, is proving to be a useful forpatrolling, good forest management and wildlife conservation as the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR), scripts a new success story with this new technology facility.
Christened ‘Suwadu’, the SPA, which has been introduced in the sprawling 321 sq km area of MTR about a year ago with an aim to revolutionize and modernize the jungle patrolling and management, is now paying dividends. The anti-poaching watchers (APW) in all the 24 anti-poaching camps deep inside the jungles are well versed in using this app now to communicate with their higher ups and the SPA monitoring station in MTR to keep them posted on patrolling duties jungles.
V.A.Saravanan, deputy director of MTR said that the app has been fashioned in such a way that the APW in 24 anti-poaching camps, have learnt to use it in their mobile phones with a measure of comfort that had led them to crisscross the MTR woods in doing their job.
“There are five to six APW staff in each anti-poaching camp who generally perambulates about eight to 15-km area inside the woods in a day. In the morning when they start their patrolling works, each camp would give a message with their group selfie that is received in the SPA monitoring centre in the MTR.
As the teams move inside the jungles, messages about their location and their patrolling route keep getting registered in the monitoring centre. This helps the officials to track the daily patrolling duty of APW teams and if necessary take corrective steps and effect changes for efficient patrolling," he added.
Every week there is review meeting and the officials would decide on how to focus more are on sensitive areas and to place the APW teams to the areas inside the woods which are left uncovered.
Though there has been no report of poaching inside the MTR for many years now, recently, this app has crucially helped identify a person who tried to sneak into the woods to poach a flying squirrel, he noted.
