I wrote a piece today about Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s conviction for defamation, and what it says about the importance of protecting free speech. While researching that piece, I came across another piece that was unrelated, but I had to share.
It’s by Sonal Matharu, for ThePrint, about Delhi’s monkey problem. Here’s how it opens:
The Delhi High Court, like the rest of the city, has a monkey problem. And it’s just not cute anymore. The court is desperate for solutions.
It’s past lunch-time and the crowd has thinned at the canteen. It’s time for the monkeys to take over. A big monkey jumps on the PVC shed overhead the food stalls, slides down a metal pipe and hops boldly to the marble tables. Just when a lawyer puts down a bowl of gulab jamun, the monkey grabs it and gulps it down. The startled lawyer swiftly scurries away, leaving his file behind. The smaller monkeys soon follow. Hopping from one table to the other, picking chapatis and curd bowls from people’s plates and dustbins.
The court has hired two men to scare the monkeys away with slingshots and people have been asked to not feed the simians in the court premises.
The solutions are also being found inside the courtroom. But the monkeys are here to stay.
Matharu writes that Delhi has been trying to fix this issue since at least 2007, when a deputy mayor of the city fell to his death after being attacked by a monkey on a balcony. The city has banned feeding monkeys and pursued various efforts to sterilize them or move them to wildlife sanctuaries.
But it hasn’t worked, and officials are giving up:
“There is no way out. The government is helpless,” says Santosh Tiwari, the lawyer representing the Delhi government in an ongoing case in the high court on the monkey menace. “The problem of monkeys is different than stray dogs, cats and birds. Monkeys are difficult to catch. The government has tried different ways, nothing has worked.”
We might think of monkeys as cute, but they bite and attack people. Matharu writes:
Inside the village’s lanes, the monkeys are a terror. Women sit on charpoys with sticks when their children play in the lanes.
“The monkeys here have bitten more than 25 people. They run after children, enter their schools and even come inside kitchens to take away our food. We have complained so many times, but no one listens,” says Sunil Kumar, a resident of Sangam Vihar village.
Delhi is running into problems with activists as well:
The biggest roadblock, officials say, is the conflicting interest of wildlife conservationists and animal rights activists on how to tackle the monkey problem.
While the conservationists argue that monkeys should live in their natural habitat — forests — the animal activists claim that caging, capturing and sterilising is exploitative and must be stopped.
It’s a problem we don’t often think about, but it’s ravaging one of the world’s largest cities, and it’s proving difficult to solve. Read Matharu’s deeply reported piece on Delhi’s monkey problem here.