This article on using mobile technology for social good is part of the #Mobile4Good series & is made possible by Vodafone India.
Did you know that every year up to 300 people and 40-50 elephants are killed due to human-elephant conflict? Young wildlife enthusiasts from Gudalur have come up with an interesting solution to tackle this issue. And it has to do with locals and mobile phones. A group of young people who grew up at the edge of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve is very keen to protect the natural world around them. The youngsters would like to save human lives too and are concerned about the many deaths and crop losses that happen every year due to human-elephant conflict in their area.
This concern has given shape to the Shola Trust, a non-profit organization involved in nature conservation in the Nilgiri region of South India.
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Mobile-based monitoring and early warning system for elephants helps to prevent human-elephant conflict.[/caption]
“We were aware of the issue and thought of channeling our enthusiasm towards conservation. We had read about a model where a mobile-based platform was used to notify people about the presence of elephants in a particular region. While that was an interesting model, it was mostly manual. We came up with an automated system, which does not require us to send messages manually to the villagers,” says Tarsh Thekaekara, from the Shola Trust.The project, called “Mobile-based monitoring and early warning system for elephants and wildlife information collection system”, is comprised of two parts. The first part is the ‘crowd sourced elephant monitoring and early warning system,’ wherein selected volunteers, starting with field staff of the local forest department, look out for the presence of elephants and notify the Shola Trust team about the same through an SMS. [caption id="attachment_32050" align="aligncenter" width="960"]
Forest guards keep a track on the location of the elephants and notify the Shola Trust team.[/caption]
Once such an alert is received by the organization, this information gets recorded in the organisation’s central system and is sent via text messages to the registered users of that particular region.
Apart from the location of the elephant, the service also provides information like the direction in which the elephant is headed and the type of elephant it is.
Elephants in Chembakolly.. Posted by The Shola Trust on Monday, August 25, 2014
A database, comprising of subscribers in villages prone to encounters with wild elephants, is maintained, which is used to send SMS alerts warning the villagers about elephant presence.
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The early warning system also tells the type of the elephant and where it is headed.[/caption]
“We chose beat guards as volunteers because they are very well versed with the area and elephant presence. They know the ‘when’ and ‘how’ of their presence and they do not need to make any extra effort to get that information. Also, if we allow anyone and everyone to send us notifications, we will increase the chances of prank calls and unnecessary chaos,” says Tarsh.
The second component of the project focuses on collecting crucial information about forest biodiversity with the help of the local community.
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The mobile platform also provides crucial information on rare birds and species.[/caption]
Registered members of the local community can send images and sound recordings over their mobile phones to a central database for further analysis and documentation by experts.
“This will allow us to get crucial information on rare birds and species and we can record them. This component of the project has not been launched as yet -- we are still working on it,” says Tarsh.
The elephant pre-warning system has already been put to use in Gudalur, near the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in the Nilgiris region of South India, and over 20 beat guards have been registered as volunteers.
“Since the project is just a few months old, we haven’t measured the impact and do not have a large number of people who have registered to the service. We are still trying to spread awareness about it. Also, in the long run, we hope to hand this project over to the forest department and let them take the initiative further,” says Tarsh.[caption id="attachment_32061" align="aligncenter" width="960"]
The idea is to provide a safe habitat to both elephants and humans.[/caption]
Started with the objective of bringing down the number of deaths due to human-elephant conflict and avoiding potential crop damage, the Shola Trust team is looking forward to wider implementation of their project.
“Our idea is to protect the people who are living in human-animal conflict prone areas so that no damage is done either to the wildlife or to human life and property,” says Tarsh.
The Shola Trust team is open to sharing their methodology with anyone else who wants to replicate it. To know more about their work, contact the team at - tarsh@thesholatrust.org or check out the website.
A lot of places in the city had no electricity, and people were stranded with cell phones without any charge. Few workarounds were posted on how they could charge their phones.
Murthy wanted to look beyond his fisherman existence and ride the waves[/caption]
Kovalam is essentially a fishing village although it is known for its beach culture as well. The daily catch Murthy brought in was just about enough to feed his family. He had nothing in excess to equip himself with in order to indulge his passion for surfing. So, wooden planks and flotsam served as his first surfboards. He taught himself to surf by trying and trying again.
Murthy perfecting his sport[/caption]
He would practice for hours and observe different types of waves. He says he made mental notes to correct his own mistakes and perfected the art of surfing through sheer hours spent in the sea. He’s not sure if it was his passion for catching waves or his innate ability to ride them that brought improvement.
The person accredited with starting the surf movement in India is Jack Hebner, an American who was drawn to India’s spiritual side. At a time when surfing was unheard of in India, he realized that different parts of the country’s coastline lent themselves well to surfing in different seasons.
Murthy with Jonty Rhodes (centre) and the 'Surfing Swami' (extreme right)[/caption]
The surf school Hebner started in 2004 in Mangalore was a key milestone in India’s surf movement. Cleverly combining spirituality with surfing, the surf swami brought a significant number of surfers from the world over to India. The surf movement has been growing since, although slowly. The best places to surf in India are Mangalore, Kovalam in Kerala, Goa, Chennai, Pondicherry, and the island of Andamans. India’s top surf schools are in these places. Every school offers training and accommodation. The trend these days is to combine yoga on the beach before and after surfing to enhance mind-body coordination.
Murthy had the chance to meet the surfing swami at Kovalam beach, Chennai, in 2001. He borrowed the swami’s surf board and took only a few minutes to adapt to it. In just a short time he rode every swell like a pro, showing no traces of having used wooden planks until then to pursue the sport. The swami was instantly impressed. He left his phone number, urging Murthy to get in touch with him. But a not-so-literate Murthy didn’t know the city codes and dial-in format to use that number. So, for a few more years, he continued to remain undiscovered by the rest of the world. But the few minutes spent on a real surfboard inspired Murthy, against his family’s wishes, to use all the family’s meagre savings to buy one.
Fishing and surfing were the dual aspects of his life until Kovalam beach, like the rest of the Coramandel coast on the Indian Ocean, was hit by a tsunami in 2004. Having lived through (or perhaps, surfed through) that natural disaster right at his doorstep, Murthy devoted much of his time towards community building. He enrolled at a local NGO and offered his time to improve the lives of the not-so-privileged around his home.
In the years that followed Murthy’s tryst with the surfing swami, more and more people discovered Chennai’s surf spots — some elite locals, some visiting Australians, a few Israelis, Americans, and Europeans. Every single surfer who came to Kovalam beach noticed Murthy for two reasons: he was a remarkably dexterous surfer and he was a devoted social worker. He had a genuine concern for people and was helping build a self-reliant community despite his own poor economic background.
Naturally, with this ability to make such a fantastic first impression, Murthy struck up great relationships and friendships with people from around the world. Some surfers shared their surf techniques with him, some shared fancy chocolates from their home countries, some gifted him their old surfboards and some went on to use their own professions and talents to spotlight Murthy’s talent.
Yotam Agam, a well known Israeli entrepreneur in Chennai, took an immense liking to Murthy. He liked the boy’s attitude. He found him ingenious, optimistic and also considerate towards others. Murthy never approached visiting surfers for help or a money loan, which he could have, given the excellent rapport he had with most of them. Instead, he just enjoyed surfing and hanging out with them without any strings attached.
A prominent businessman and sports aficionado in Chennai, Arun Vasu, also took notice of Murthy's talent. Murthy was already on a winning spree then. He had won coveted places in many Asian surfing competitions in Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia, which were hotly contested by people from around the world. He had a growing network of international fans.
Arun Vasu decided to invest in Murthy. This was a huge turning point for the surfer. The patron generously offered to build a surf school around Murthy’s talent and to support it until the school was able to generate its own running costs.
The surf season in Chennai starts in the pre-monsoon month of April and continues until the end of the monsoon season in September. Covelong Point is an exposed beach and reef break that has pretty reliable surf. Offshore winds are from the west northwest. The ideal swell direction is from the east southeast. Typically, this coast inherits the wave conditions in Bali two or three days later. Waves at the beach break both left and right and there is a right hand reef break too. Surfing here means negotiating dangerous rips but it also means that one can surf a relatively uncrowded peak.
Built with modern facilities, the 
Murthy's boys[/caption]
What sets Murthy’s team apart from other surf schools in the country is its service to the community. Murthy intends to attract sports minded (as opposed to money minded) people with a sense of social service to the community. The teachers at Covelong Point regularly lead beach clean-ups. In the recent past, they also organized health camps and eye check-ups for the locals who have no access to reliable health care. They have a no smoking, no drugs, no alcohol policy to propagate clean and healthy sporting habits. They host a spectacular three-day eclectic 
A road made of waste plastic[/caption]
Prof. R. Vasudevan[/caption]
This app captures the location of the bus and shares it with parents and the school if required. The bus attendant can install and keep it on his/her phone. The attendant adds all students to the app by scanning their Quick Response (QR) Code-based ID cards, using bar code scanning, as and when the students board or get off the bus. Student activities are recorded on the Cloud – to be used by schools in case of emergencies.
The admin version has to be with the administrator of the school transport system so he/she can see all the buses together, locate the position of a particular bus, get information about it, and find out which students are present in the bus at any given time.
Parents have to get their mobile numbers verified before they get access to the app. Once they are in, they can find the location of the bus by clicking on the ‘Bus on Map’ option. Alternatively, they can tap on ‘Bus Location’ and ‘Distance & Time’ options to find out the exact address of the bus and how soon the child will reach home. To find out if the child is there in the bus or not, they just have to select the ‘Child in Bus’ option. Parents who don’t have android phones can give a missed call to the attendant’s phone whenever they want the information. The LOCATERA attendant looks into the bank of registered numbers to find out which parent has called. He/she then sends an SMS with information about the child and the bus location.
Arjun used Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s programming tool called MIT App Inventor to develop LOCATERA. It is basically a programming language tool with a more graphical user interface, instead of codes.
Arjun submitted the app to ‘Google India Code to Learn Contest 2015’ and was declared the winner. He also won the MIT 'App of the Month (Best Design)' award in December 2012 for Ez School Bus Locator.
Arjun at the award ceremony[/caption]
He also likes to play the keyboard, and is a badminton enthusiast in his free time.