State to fight monkey menace with Uttarakhand, Delhi help

Pratibha Chauhan

Tribune News Service

Shimla, January 15

As part of its multi-pronged strategy to combat monkey menace, Himachal will tie up with other simian-affected states like Uttarakhand and Delhi to develop equipment which will help scare away monkeys into the forests and also enable their mapping and study behaviour pattern.

Uttarakhand has shared with Himachal the technology developed by it to scare away and undertake mapping of monkeys with the help of ultrasonic sounds which has succeeded to a great extent. Similarly, Delhi has shared its experience where the monkeys have been pushed into the forests and they havebecome used to living there.

“We have asked Uttarakhand to develop equipment which meet our needs so that we too can use it to tackle the monkey menace,” revealed Tarun Kapoor, Principal Secretary, Forest and Environment. He said if these equipment and gadgets succeed in combating the problem, these would be used extensively in all endemic areas.

The Forest Department has also assigned projects to the CSIR and the State Council for Science, Technology and Environment for developing technology which can be used to scare monkeys. The endeavour is to scare away monkeys from fields and orchards to save crops and fruits from simians. Almost all 3,256 panchayats are affected by the monkey menace and the districts of Shimla, Solan, Sirmaur, Hamirpur, Mandi and Bilaspur are the worst affected.

Kapoor visited the forests developed on the outskirts of Delhi to sustain about 20,000 monkeys which had become a nuisance in the Capital. “The experiment of pushing the monkeys to the forests has succeeded. They are fed bananas, vegetables and soaked black gram and also feed on the natural vegetation that has been planted keeping in mind their food requirement,” he said.

He said Himachal had already moved a proposal before the Central Zoo Authority for the setting up a similar park near Tara Devi or on the outskirts of Shimla. The Forets Department was planning to have three of these monkey areas near towns where monkey menace was the worst. Monkeys had already been declared vermin by the Union Ministry of Environemnt and Forest within Shimla area and 39 tehsils of the state.

The Forest Department has also sent a proposal to the Centre, seeking declaring monkeys as vermin in 53 tehsils of the state based on their density in these select areas identified as hot spots, for one year.