Urban Menace: India can no longer afford to monkey around on macaque management; here is why

Gul Khan is a self-proclaimed monkey chaser. His clientele includes the who’s who of New Delhi. “It’s a family business,” he says. His cousins are employed by the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Prime Minister’s Office, NITI Aayog and the Union ministries of finance, commerce and external affairs to keep monkeys at bay.

Khan has been in this peculiar profession for over three decades now. Earlier, he used to deploy langurs, the larger long-tailed primates, to chase away the rhesus macaques. Since 2012, when the government banned the use of the primates citing cruelty, Khan has perfected the call of a langur and now relies on his voice to scare away monkeys.

The likes of Khan are in demand in Delhi, which has seen an alarming rise in the simian population and the consequential increase in monkey bites and raiding of government buildings and residential neighbourhoods for food. The authorities, it seems, woke up to this menace only in 2007.

In October that year, Delhi’s deputy mayor S S Bajwa fell off the terrace of his house while trying to stave off monkeys rampaging his house and succumbed to head injuries.

Earlier that year, while hearing a public interest petition, filed by the residents of New Friends Colony in Delhi in 2000, the Delhi high court banned feeding monkeys in public areas, allowed municipal authorities to fine those who violate the directive and directed the government to round up monkeys from human habitations and translocate them to the Asola-Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary on Delhi-Haryana border. The court had also asked a special committee to explore the option of sterilisation of monkeys.

But the plans have not worked. Over the 15 years, the authorities have translocated some 20,000 monkeys to the sanctuary and provide them food. Monkeys still stray out of the overpopulated sanctuary and have become a menace for the adjacent villages and housing societies.

The niche left vacant by them are filled by other troops of monkeys and the conflict continues. In January 2023, the Delhi High Court received another public interest petition that sought records on the funds spent to curb the monkey menace.

The Delhi government in its submission has said the menace is getting difficult to address since surgical sterilisation was not working and not enough monkey catchers are coming forward to help.

The helplessness expressed by the Delhi government indicates not only the severity of the problem in the country but also the lack of clear strategies to mitigate the conflict.

In the absence of consolidated data on people killed or injured due to monkey bites, 2015 data with Primate Research Centre in Jodhpur, shows India’s cities record about 1,000 monkey bites every day.

Monkeys are also carriers of rabies and other zoonotic diseases like haemorrhagic Kyasanur Forest Disease, and cause damages to properties and crops. 

Down To Earth had earlier reported that Himachal Pradesh loses crops worth Rs 500 crore annually due to wild animals, including monkeys. The state has been trying to tackle the menace for two decades now.

In 2006, it became the first state to initiate a macaque sterilisation programme. According to its forest department’s website, the state has sterilised 170,169 or 51.4 per cent of its macaque population by 2021. Yet, this has not helped and since 2016, the state has resorted to the culling of rhesus macaques from time to time by declaring them “vermin”.

What’s worse is that such conflicts continue even as region-specific studies indicate a decline in monkey numbers in recent years. In Himachal Pradesh, the population of monkeys has declined by 57 per cent to 136,443 between 2004 and 2020. Uttarakhand’s forest department has found a 25 per cent decline in monkey population between 2015 and 2021. Does this indicate flaws in the strategies to tackle human-monkey conflicts?

Since macaques are revered in India, they are killed rarely despite being allowed in cases where they are responsible for raiding crops, says Anindya Sinha, primatologist and head of academics at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru.

Translocation is often viewed as an easy option. But Mewa Singh, professor at University of Mysore, Mysusru, says, translocation requires keeping the animals in captivity for a long time, which may trigger behavioural changes in them and make them susceptible to diseases and parasitic infections.

Sterilisation has emerged as a promising alternative in recent years. But doing so for male macaques has little value because of the primate’s promiscuous mating system. Due to their testosterone levels, sterilisation of male macaques also runs the risk of increasing aggression.

“Their social system mandates sterilisation of females even though doing so for males is simpler,” Sinha says. In March 2023, Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Bhupender Yadav released 14 guidelines to address human-wildlife conflict, which recommend surgical sterilisation of male macaques by thermocautery coagulative vasectomy and of female macaques by endoscopic thermal-cautery tubectomy.

Even this process has its hurdles. The first issue, Sinha says, is that it requires capturing monkeys and monkey catchers are hard to come by. Secondly, people do not want to permanently sterilise monkeys because it is a complex and costly process.

Third is our lack of understanding in what happens to sterilised monkeys; are they accepted back? “Such studies on long-term impacts of female sterilisation of monkeys have not been done anywhere in the world,” he says.

In December 2022, the Centre removed rhesus macaques from Schedule II of the Wildlife Protection Act. Stripped of the protection that comes with being labelled as an endangered species whose killing and hunting is illegal, rhesus macaques are now akin to stray cats and dogs.

Sinha wonders whether this will trigger a resumption of exporting rhesus macaques for the purpose of medical research. “This could be disastrous for their population,” he says.

As primatologist Iqbal Malik, founder-director of non-profit Vatavaran, says, non-human and human primates have always coexisted in a stable and calm state. Stresses, fears and bitterness developed between the two species only in the past 50 years or so. And we can restore the relationship only by understanding how it eroded.

According to Sinha, the problem is twofold. The first, and the obvious, reason is the loss of habitat due to the rapid increase in urbanisation, industrialisation and agriculture. But once a troop of monkeys becomes familiar with humans, they do not prefer going back to their natural habitats.

“We see this in national parks as well as in places lined along the highway, where tourists feed monkeys. They then move closer to areas inhabited by humans.”

Yogesh Gokhale, senior fellow, Forestry and Biodiversity Division in The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), says loss of habitat and a poor waste management system in urban areas gives monkeys easy access to food and is driving the troops here.

Macaques in these regions have evolved to become highly skilful, having learnt how to open packaged foods, bottles and sift through garbage. The human-rhesus macaque conflict mitigation guidelines describe refuse bins and waste containment as “the most important anthropogenic aspects of human-macaque interface zones since they are an easily accessible, high-yield, and reliable food source for macaques.”

In urban areas where natural food is not available, the macaques are entirely dependent on human provisioned food, garbage dumps and house raids. Hence waste management is essential to ensure a reduction in birth rates, aggression and nuisance to people.

However, municipal authorities must tread this approach carefully since interrupting the food supply of macaques makes them more aggressive, the guidelines note.

Along with this, there is a need to create suitable habitat for them, says Iqbal. Some states like Odisha, Kerala and Telangana are already working towards this. But without a mechanism in place to assess their impact, it is difficult to gauge what works and what does not.

Read more:

• Urban Menace: Focus on human-monkey conflict management
• Urban Menace: Make designated monkey zones

This article is part of a cover story first published in the 16-30 June, 2023 print edition of Down To Earth

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