Karnataka: With a speaker, torchlights, ryot saves paddy crop from wild boars

UDUPI: For the past several years, Govinda Rao, a farmer from Ulthoor village in Kundapur has been working on solutions to avoid man-animal conflict. He, with a cost-effective method of torchlights and bluetooth speaker, has been able to keep animals at bay at his paddy fields.
An assistant teacher (Science) at the Chethana High School in Hangarakatte, he said that wild boars have been destroying crops regularly on his six acre paddy field that he has inherited. Govinda Rao told TOI that nearly 20% of the crops are destroyed every year due to animal attacks. On several occasions, upset with the destruction, the family had even thought of giving up cultivation.
"I have been reading about low-cost crop protection measures and decided to try out the same. Last year, along with my son, Ayush, a Class seven student, two LED torches were placed in separate transparent boxes, tied to a pole and placed in the opposite direction on either ends of the field. The torch lights are rechargeable and last for about seven hours when switched on. Due to the wind or insects and birds touching the box, the transparent box in which the torch is placed rotates and the light is on the entire field. Since it was successful to an extent, this year, we decided to tie a bluetooth speaker to a tree and connected it to a pen drive and the entire night recorded sounds of a tiger roar, elephant trumpet, dogs barking are played.
The sounds have been carefully selected by my son Ayush from the internet and this way, we have managed to save our crops from wild boars, deer, bison and peacocks," he said.
As soon as word of this experiment spread in the village, several farmers visited the field to learn about it and have also implemented the same. "We have uploaded this experiment details on YouTube. The impact of this is for about 1-3 kilometers and animal attacks were recorded in places away from our field. This is a simple cost-effective method to address man-animal conflict and we have been successful so far. The entire set up costs less than Rs 1,000," he added.