What happened: new safeguards for captive elephant monitoring and transfer

The Government of India strengthened safeguards against illegal trade and movement of captive elephants by combining (1) science-based identity verification and (2) rule-based control of interstate transfers. The Government’s stated aim is to curb illegal transfer and improve evidence quality in legal proceedings.

The main components described in the PIB backgrounder are:

Gajah Suchana mobile application (DNA-based monitoring)

The Government launched and uses the Gajah Suchana mobile application to maintain a national genetic database. The database is described as containing:

DNA profiles of every registered captive elephant morphological characteristics of every registered captive elephant ownership details of every registered captive elephant

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