Dhinesh Kallungal By Express News Service THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Stung by the illegal wildlife trade, the state forest department has submitted a proposal to set up a high-end cyber forensic lab exclusively to deal with wildlife crimes in the state. At present, police and forest departments are cooperating in the investigation of wildlife crimes. But the forest department feels that a high-end cyber forensic lab will provide technical assistance to investigators for collecting and analysing digital evidence. A formal proposal to set up the lab was submitted by the department to the state government. Speaking to TNIE, P K Kesavan, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Head of Forest Force, said, though there is a rise in wildlife crimes cases nationally, there is no major increase in wildlife crimes in Kerala. However, the state has been witnessing a shift in the nature of wildlife crimes of late. In the past, if timber thefts constituted 70 per cent of the total crimes registered in the state, now wildlife crimes like poaching, trafficking and trade constitute around 70 per cent of the cases being registered in the state and timber theft has dropped to 30 per cent. Further, the emergence of social media platforms and the internet has made things easy for the wildlife traffickers. In addition, cases like Edamalayar poaching case, in which poachers allegedly hunted down around two dozen wild elephants and carcass of around 17 elephants were retrieved leading to the arrest of over 50 people, had exposed the inter-state and transnational links of wildlife racketeers. In the case, the ivory artefacts seized from the arrested in Delhi were tested in Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) to ascertain whether they were made of elephant tusk. A 2016 analysis of the Ministry of Environment and Forest had found that as many as 106 websites, including prominent names such as quikr.com, olx.in, alibaba.com, eBay.com, youtube.com, shopping.rediff.com, amazon.com, snapdeal.com and petsmart.com were used by poachers to traffic wildlife articles. Though scores of cases were registered under Kerala Forest Act annually, Kerala registered 26 wildlife crimes in 2016 followed by 33 in 2017 and 16 in 2018.

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