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News / Magazine / States / Leopards make suburban Mumbai new hunting ground, kill 15 people

Leopards make suburban Mumbai new hunting ground, kill 15 people

Suburban Mumbai learns to live with big cats that have already killed 15 people after being forced to hunt outside their
habitat.
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Sandeep Unnithan
November 17, 2003 ISSUE DATE: November 17, 2003 | UPDATED: June 27, 2012 09:50 IST

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ILL AT EASE: A captured leopard

It was past midnight and Deepak Angrula was leafing through his digital communications textbook when he heard a loud clang, a series of
roars followed by the rush of footfalls. "That's another one," the 20-year-old final year BTech student thought to himself. He did not even stir
from his seat. Unlike some months ago.

When the first leopard (Panthera pardus) was trapped on the precincts of IIT Powai earlier this year, it became an overnight celebrity.
Crowds jammed the bylanes on the fringes of the campus to view the snarling beast, caught and incarcerated in a 6 ft by 3 ft cage fashioned
by the institute's mechanical engineering department. Six cats have been trapped in the leafy 600-acre campus in the north-western
Mumbai suburb of Powai this year and leopard sightings have become almost a daily phenomenon.

The cats use the pathways under a massive bunch of water supply lines snaking past the campus. Outside the park, they create fear and
havoc, often death until they are trapped and released back into the wild. Once skirting Mumbai city limits, the Sanjay Gandhi National Park
(SGNP), a dense, unfenced 100 sq km forest, has now been encircled by an ever expanding concrete sprawl, turning it into the world's only
national park within city limits.

Amid its undulating hills are the Vihar and Tulsi lakes, which not only supply 10 per cent of Mumbai's water needs but also sustain the fauna
of the area. Fish-eating fresh water crocodiles bask on the lakeside with their mouths open while leopards, numbering around 40, pad
about, hunting deer and small mammals. In the past few months, however, most of the hunting has moved to outside the park.

The greens around IIT Powai

Click here to Enlarge

Fifteen people have been killed by leopards in 23 attacks in the past year, with children being the main targets. In the latest incident on
October 8, a leopard entered the compound of the upper-middle class Raheja Vihar residential enclave in Powai. Four-year old Amol Bansal
was playing with his friends when a leopard crept upon him and killed him. But it was thwarted from making off with the boy's body. Worse,
eyewitnesses say the spotted beasts seem to have lost their fear of man. "We see them almost every day now.
It's almost as if they have turned into domestic cats," says an exasperated Major (retd) Rajesh Dhankar, security officer at IIT. "Earlier, we
tossed firecrackers at them and they fled. Now they just stand and stare at us." Naturalists are quick to point out that despite all the killings,
the leopards are no man-eaters. "These are cases of mistaken identity leading to man-killing incidents rather than man-eating incidents,"
says Bittu Sahgal, editor, Sanctuary magazine.

The highest casualties have been sustained by children, whom leopards mistake for animals, or women squatting in open-air toilets. No
studies have been done to conclusively prove why the leopards are making incursions into human habitation. But many believe it has to do
with the easy availability of new prey-stray dogs, which have replaced deer as the cats' primary prey. The residential complexes and slums
adjoining the park have created a parallel ecosystem.

Their garbage dumps attract stray dogs, which in turn lure leopards. Of the original 50,000 slum hutments located inside the park, only
12,000 remain today, largely due to the intervention of the Bombay High Court. The dogs are such easy kills that some leopards don't
bother to hunt their natural prey. "There is an anomaly," says A.R. Bharati, divisional forest offer, SGNP. "The park's deer population is
increasing and there's no evidence they are being killed by leopards." Quips Debi Goenka of the Bombay Environmental Action Group: "It's
almost as if food counters have been set up for the leopards outside the national park."

Bharati also theorises that the incredibly adaptive cats-they are known to thrive in sugarcane fields in Pune district- could be breeding in
wooded areas outside the park. The leopard scare has prompted SGNP authorities to double the number of traps around the park this year.
Six have been set up in locations ranging from Raheja Vihar to Powai Garden and Vikhroli. Four more will be added in the next few months.
The SGNP, Mumbai's lungs so to say, is a rich bio-diversity spot that boasts 40 species of mammals, 251 species of migratory, land and water
birds, 38 species of reptiles and nine species of amphibians, besides a large variety of fishes, insects and other life forms.

With the man-animal conflict on its boundaries, SGNP knows the importance of confining the leopards to the park. Evironmentalists say
there are short and long-term solutions for this. But these haven't been implemented either due to a financial crunch or sheer apathy.
Sahgal suggests a dusk-to-dawn curfew for children, night watches, door-to-door education campaigns and clearing of garbage dumps, and
importantly, the immediate eviction of the slum dwellers inside the park. The only long-term solution is a chain-link fence around the park.

This has so far proceeded at a stop-start pace. The Ministry of Environment and Forests released Rs 10 crore for the construction of a 22 km
boundary wall along parkland bordering the most heavily populated areas, but only half has been completed. Despite 70 lakh visitors
annually, the highest number of visitors for a national park in India, SGNP also has financial problems. After spending over 70 per cent of its
yearly state government allotment of Rs 3 crore on staff salaries, it has few options but to depend on external funding.

But the most beguiling aspect of the problem is how little we know about the leopards themselves. A proposal floated by the Bombay
Natural History Society to radio-collar the leopards to study their movements and habits was inexplicably shot down by the Union
Government. In such circumstances, forest officials and naturalists can only speculate about what can be done. So lackadaisical catch-and-
release rituals like those at IIT Powai will continue and the leopards will continue to hunt where no one wants them to-outside their habitat.

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