In September, a viral video showed a woman in Udaipur, Rajasthan, tying up a leopard that had entered her house with a rope, and covering it with a blanket, before calling the forest department to deal with the animal. The woman’s act of bravery was widely shared on social media. However, in the other end of the country, luck was not on a 12-year-old boy’s side as he was severely injured in a leopard attack in the Maligaon area of Guwahati in Assam earlier this year.
Far away in Bengaluru, the capital city of Karnataka, a leopard was spotted in Electronics City in September last year— footage captured by CCTV cameras showed the big cat crossing a flyover near a toll plaza early in the morning—raising concerns among local residents about the increasing number of wildlife encounters in the area. Just a few weeks earlier, another leopard was sighted at BSR Layout in Kyalasanahalli near Jigani, close to the Bannerghatta National Park.
In the National Capital Region (NCR), a leopard entered a residential society in Sohna in January, but was safely captured after a four-hour-long rescue operation.
In Maharashtra, a two-year-old boy, playing near his home, was killed when a leopard pounced on him and dragged him away in Vadner Gate on the outskirts of Nashik city in September this year. Around nine people have died in leopard attacks so far this year in Nashik district alone.
Around the same time, a six-year-old boy was mauled to death in the Junnar area of Pune in a similar leopard attack, said to be the second in the district this year. Last year, eight persons lost their lives in Pune in human-leopard conflicts, the second deadliest year in the past 20 years.
A growing threat
Wild animal sightings are not new but what’s rousing fear and anger among the public are that such encounters are becoming more and more frequent in urban centres, causing widespread panic, and deepening the faultlines of man-animal conflicts. Experts agree that several factors could be causing this phenomenon, but foremost among them is the rapid loss of habitat and edible migration paths that our wild animals are experiencing at the expense of urbanisation and deforestation.
In a report released by UK-based business energy consultancy Utility Bidder in 2024 on global loss of forest cover and deforestation, India ranked second after Brazil. The report says that with a difference of 284,400 hectares in forestry loss between 1990 and 2020, India has seen the biggest increase in deforestation. Between 2015 and 2020, India had lost almost 668,400 hectares of forest cover. A separate report released by IIT Bombay this year, accounting for 2015-2019, said that for every 1 sq km of forest gained during the four-year period, the country lost nearly 18 sq km.
Post this period, however, the forest cover seems to be improving, but at a snail’s pace, according to the India State of Forest Report of 2023. The report, which is released every two years, has found the forest cover gradually increasing with every edition, with the 2023 report saying that it rose by 1,445.81 sq km, with a 156.41 sq km rise in forest cover compared to 2021.
Animals are being forced out of their habitats and into areas inhabited by humans, because of the unchecked depletion of their own areas. More accurately, humans are systematically encroaching into forest areas to take advantage of not only the land, but the vegetation as well. Wildlife habitats are shrinking as urban centres keep pushing their boundaries. As such, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and consequently the forest departments of the respective states, are also taking simultaneous steps to protect and preserve natural wild habitats to secure the animal populations native to the country.
Giving an example of the elephant corridor on the Karnataka-Maharashtra border, through which herds of elephants migrate, Anand Shinde, founder of Trunk Call—The Wildlife Foundation, says: “This route passes by some villages, and had stopped seeing elephants altogether because that corridor was no longer edible —elephants travelling that path would find no grass or food to feed on during the journey. This would lead to a lot of elephants wandering into the villagers’ farmlands, which they naturally did not appreciate.”
Kedar Gore, director of The Corbett Foundation, a non-profit for wildlife conservation, explains that humans begrudge or become violent towards wild animals because they mistake the animals’ natural instinct to search for food as crop raiding. He says that while the habitats for tigers are shrinking, their population is increasing, due to initiatives like Project Tiger and the work of the respective forest departments.
Gore explains that most tiger reserves have a core area and a buffer area—the core being the dense interiors of the forest, and the buffer being the outer parts, closer to villages or human settlements. “These buffer areas are a mosaic of forest area, villages, and farmland,” he says, pointing out that these are essentially areas that are being shared by humans and wildlife, making them areas of man-animal conflicts. “Tigers depend on corridors for movement like we depend on the metro systems in cities,” he stresses.
About 35-40% of the tiger population of the country live outside the core habitat and operate in the buffer zone which are closer to human habitation, says Gore. Citing an example, he says: “The area between Ranthambore and Sariska used to be corridors, safe and edible for the tigers to move through. Now that the corridor does not exist anymore—the tigers cannot be expected to immediately chart an alternative route to avoid disturbing humans.”
Violent reactions
In June, a four-year-old leopard was beaten to death by locals in Amroha, Uttar Pradesh, after it attacked and injured six farmers working in the fields. Similarly, in Rajasthan’s Udaipur district, another leopard was beaten to death by villagers after it attacked a 55-year-old man and his cattle outside his house in October last year.
These are not one-off cases. In the past too, several leopards and other animals have been targeted by civilians when they venture into human-inhabited areas in search of prey. In the buffer zone of the Bandipur Tiger Reserve in Karnataka in July this year, the carcasses of 20 monkeys were found stuffed in bags and dumped along the Kandegala-Kodesoge Road. In Meerut, a man was filmed violently beating a stray dog to death, after which an FIR was filed against him.
In Kerala, the government asked for the Centre’s permission to kill wild animals that pose a threat to life and property of humans. The move came after the state government declared human-wildlife conflict a state-specific disaster to expedite aid and relief, earlier this year.
Although no definitive data exists on the number of animal deaths in urban centres and the manner in which they died or were killed, animal rights organisations and online activists remain active in reporting the perpetrators or spreading awareness. These human-animal conflicts very often manifest into what can only be described as abuse and murder of wild animals—which is not a sustainable way of life, especially for those living near forests.
However, all’s not lost yet. In Ladakh, snow leopards were preying on the cattle in the farmlands, and the rearers would have to sleep out in the open, putting themselves in danger. They were also ready to take action against the animals. However, Dr Tsewang Namgail, founder of the Snow Leopard Conservancy Trust of India, took up the initiative to set up strong corrals to protect people’s livestock, allowing them to sleep indoors, and minimising snow leopard attacks on livestock as well.
“In these situations, domesticated cattle become prime prey for tigers and leopards—either because there is a lack of wild prey in their habitat, or because they are adapting to their new reshaped habitat,” says Gore of The Corbett Foundation. “What are simple acts of sustenance for a carnivore become understood as crop raiding or cattle raiding by the humans in the area.”
“Urbanisation of corridors is the main reason that wildlife is being pushed into and restricted to fragmented forest areas,” says Dr Sandeep Tiwari, deputy director of the Wildlife Trust of India, a wildlife conservation charity organisation in India, stressing that the issue is largely a man-made one—knowingly developing formerly forested areas will result in wild animals straying into urban centres.
“When livestock are killed, or when their friends and relatives are killed in an animal attack, it becomes much more difficult to reason and bargain for empathy from the civilians for the animal,” he says. “In that situation, the logic that the animal’s intention was to find food, and not commit murder, does not land that easily. But with increasing populations of humans as well as the disproportionately increasing populations of carnivores in the country, these conflicts are bound to rise,” adds Tiwari.
Peaceful co-existence
In an effort to save the Ranthambore-Sariska corridor and the elephants using it, Shinde of Trunk Call—The Wildlife Foundation, often called the ‘elephant whisperer’, not only received permission from the Maharashtra forest department to begin awareness and plantation work in the first 50 villages lining the corridor, but also eventually in all 104 villages that fall on the path. He undertook an initiative to educate the villagers on elephants, their movements and habits, and involve them in plantation efforts.
Meanwhile in Odisha, almost 45 people had been killed in elephant attacks since April 2, as per the state forest minister’s revelations at the state assembly in September. Around the same time, nine elephants were also found dead, one of which was killed in a train accident. “We had many meetings with the villagers, explaining to them that the elephants would not need to wander into their land, if their migration route was equipped with sufficient food to nourish and satisfy them,” shares Shinde.
With the help of the villagers, Shinde eventually planted around 12,000 elephant grass plants—not saplings—ones that were already five years grown, so that the area could become edible for the elephants sooner. In three years, elephant herds were back in numbers on that route, making no interference in the villagers’ lives.
“Not only the elephants, but we saw the Indian Gir (a cattle breed) and deer families which had left the corridor also come back into the area, simply because we planted a few 25 hectares of elephant grass, in a forest area which is about 45,000 hectares in totality,” says Shinde, adding that such measures of educating the public most affected by the conflict, and taking simple measures like plantations for preservation of the ecology of the area.
Tiwari of the Wildlife Trust of India has also extensively worked in preserving elephant corridors. Through his village relocation project, he arranged for civilians to move away from areas close to wildlife habitats and particularly elephant corridors, and settled them elsewhere. He shares that the project ended up being a resounding success, with other village residents agreeing to relocation as well.
Meanwhile, state governments for long have also been involved in the management of stray dogs and monkeys, some of the most commonly sighted animals in urban areas that pose a nuisance to residents. In the recent past, cases of dog bites have drawn widespread concern. Earlier this year, the Union Minister of State for Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying SP Singh Baghel had revealed that in 2024 alone, over 37 lakh dog bite cases and 54 human rabies deaths were recorded in the country. As a response to this, cases of animal cruelty and relocation of dogs have also increased—this is apart from the mass sterilisation efforts for dogs that are already underway in certain states.
With monkeys too, similar steps have been taken. For example, the Allahabad High Court has directed the Animal Welfare Board of UP to work on the action plan for management of the rising monkey population in the state. Much like dogs, money bites can also cause rabies.
Co-existence needs to be practised more,” insists Gore of The Corbett Foundation, adding that it is a fool’s dream to imagine a future where there will be designated separate areas for wildlife and human habitation. “People living near forest areas must be involved in the conservation programmes—we have to think of how this conflict might exacerbate in the next 20 years, if we do not take action,” he says.
“Mines are coming up in the corridors. Roads are being widened without appropriate and enough mitigation measures,” Gore lists, “And these things cannot be put to side as they are development projects.” However, he says that attention can be dedicated to ensuring that tiger populations across reserves grow proportionately. “We cannot manipulate the habitats in a way that will affect long-term conservation of animals,” he adds.
