MONKEYS ARE EVERYWHERE

As Delhi expands with half a million new residents moving in every year, the green areas in and around the capital, which for centuries have been a habitat for monkeys, grow smaller. This is why the monkeys have started to move into the city centre. The authorities did very little about the city’s increasing wild monkey population until they caused a government official to fall from his terrace. The official, Sawinder Singh Bajwa, 52, was reading a paper on his balcony on a Sunday morning when four monkeys appeared. He tried to scare them away with a stick, but he lost his balance and fell. Officials expressed their sadness about the accident, but people criticized them for failing to remove the aggressive gangs of monkeys from the city. Monkeys cause other problems as well. They invade some of the most prestigious monuments in the city. Politicians with residences in the area tried to solve this problem by hiring private monkey catchers who use a large, dark-faced monkey, the langur, to scare away the smaller wild ones. Part of the difficulty lies in people’s uncertainty towards animals. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, followers of the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman, risk being fined for feeding the monkeys. “We have a serious problem because of our religious ways,” Ms Mehra says, “people feed them liberally. However, they do attack. In the past three years, there have been 2,000 cases of monkey bites in Delhi.” Just recently, a wild monkey attacked in a low-income neighbourhood of the capital. The Associated Press reported that it injured several people, mostly children. Sadly, such incidents are common in Delhi.