An elephant can cross a tea garden without warning.

One moment, people may be working among the rows of bushes. The next, a herd could be moving towards a field, forest edge or settlement. In North Bengal, where elephant movement often overlaps with farms, tea gardens and villages, knowing that an animal is nearby can make a difference to what happens next.

Today, that warning could arrive on a phone.

The HEC Alert app, developed by the NWA Nature & Wildlife Foundation, is designed to give people living in elephant habitats an early warning when an elephant is reported nearby.

HEC stands for Human-Elephant Conflict. A registered user can report an elephant sighting, after which nearby users receive a notification. The app uses GPS to locate observations and can show recent elephant sightings around a user's position.

The idea is simple: give people time to respond before an encounter turns into a conflict.

The Better India looked at NWA's documents, its HEC Alert platform and the app's current listing to understand how the system has evolved and how the technology fits into the larger community response in North Bengal.

When an elephant becomes a warning

Where is the elephant?

Is it in a tea garden? Has it entered a crop field? Is it moving towards a settlement? Which direction is it taking? And who needs to know?

The HEC Alert system is built around this chain of information.

NWA first announced the public release of HEC Alert on 18 March 2020, following what it described as extensive development and testing. India and Thailand were among the first countries where the application was made available.

At the time, NWA said registered users could report elephant sightings in real time and receive alerts for sightings within a 25-km radius. The organisation also proposed eventually making HEC data available to registered NGOs, scientists and government agencies.

More than six years later, the system is more than a notification service.

The HEC Alert app and NWA's online public 'elephant database' now work from the same database.

The organisation invites communities, volunteers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders to contribute observations. These can then be viewed through the platform, where elephant activity is represented using maps and heatmap layers.

This creates a record of sightings that might otherwise remain a word-of-mouth warning.

Someone sees an elephant. The sighting is recorded. People nearby can be notified. The observation also becomes part of a wider pool of information about where elephants are being reported.

The technology is not meant to replace the person standing at the edge of........

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