MOHALI, April 11: — In a pioneering effort to monitor forest resources and combat timber smuggling, the Punjab Forest Department has begun embedding radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in khair trees in Mohali’s Shivalik foothills — marking the first initiative of its kind in the state.
Launched as a pilot project, the initiative focuses on areas vulnerable to illegal logging near the Haryana and Himachal Pradesh borders. According to officials, more than 200 RFID chips have been implanted in mature khair trees across 15 identified pockets along the Siswan-Baddi highway and nearby Mullanpur and Mirzapur regions.
“This project will prove useful as any movement or loss of signal from the chip will trigger an alert, helping reduce the time lag in crime detection,” said Kanwardeep Singh, Divisional Forest Officer (DFO), who is supervising the project. “Due to the lack of CCTV coverage in forests, tracking offences becomes a major challenge.”
RFID technology relies on radio waves to transmit data from a small chip without the need for direct contact. Each chip costs approximately Rs 2,500 and is capable of delivering real-time updates on tree growth and any tampering attempts. The transmitter can also trace the movement of felled timber if smuggled out of the protected zones.
Khair trees have been targeted heavily by timber mafias because their wood yields ‘kattha’ and ‘cutch’—products commonly used in paan, Ayurvedic medicine, the tanning industry, and as preservatives. Forest officials mentioned that khair is the most prevalent species in the Mohali region, making it a logical starting point.
Once results from the pilot phase are evaluated, the department plans to extend the RFID tracking to sheesham and other valuable tree species in additional districts. “We are currently selecting trees at random, but the larger goal is to establish a database that can monitor tree health and improve accountability across forest divisions,” said Singh.
The effort comes in response to increasing concerns about organized timber smuggling and environmental degradation in Punjab’s forest zones. The forest department raised that proactive surveillance tools like RFID could serve as a deterrent and support swift enforcement in areas beyond the reach of manual patrolling.
The department aims to assess the effectiveness of the RFID system over the coming months before scaling it further statewide.
