The environment and forests ministry on Friday announced a new conceptual project of using information technology to create a "virtual fence" to prevent wild animals from straying into human habitation.

The proposed technology may be used to monitor poaching and illegal activities and protect both man and wild animals. The ministry sources said the project consists of three key components: virtual fence (VF), trail surveillance (TS) and forest patch monitoring (FPM).

The "virtual fence" will ensure that the wild animals straying into the human habitations are driven back to forests while TS and FPM will be used to track the movement of animals and alert any illegal activity taking place in the area respectively.

The system is expected to help save lives of animals which may stray on to highways and rail tracks and get killed by speeding vehicles. The technology will have sensors that track the movement of animals by detecting sounds or using thermal energy.

If this project succeeds, it would assist in confining wild animals within their boundaries, saving them as well as mitigating threat to livestock and crops, reducing man-animal conflict.

Other potential solutions that the ministry will be putting into operation include creation of other appropriate animal barriers like solar, barbed wire, chain-link fencing, walls and trenches, capture of problematic animals, establishment of ‘Rapid Response Teams’ to deal with such conflicts, adequate and timely compensation to victims and education to local people in dealing with conflicts with animals.

Sources pointed out that some devices of the information technology, like radio collars with very high frequency, global positioning system and satellite uplink facilities, are being used by the research institutions including Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, state forest departments and the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) to monitor the movement of lions, tigers, elephants, Olive Ridley turtles, and other wild animals to understand their movements and their use pattern of the habitat.

Under various centrally-sponsored schemes, sources said the ministry has been providing financial and technical assistance to the state governments for the conservation and management of wildlife, including activities aimed at mitigating man-animal conflicts.

They pointed out that there are 661 protected areas in the country covering around 4.8 per cent of the country's geographical areas. There are 100 national parks, 514 wildlife sanctuaries, 43 conservation reserves and 4 community reserves in the country.

Also 27 elephant reserves (ERs) extending over about 60,000 sq km have been formally notified as the wild elephants probably kill far more people than tiger, leopard or lion, though the human conflict involving leopard draws great amount of public attention compared to other animals.

Other carnivores – tigers, lions and wolves which have been known for causing a large number of human deaths in the past, are now mostly restricted in range and their impact is not as widespread as that of the leopard, the sources added.