SPOTTED IN THE C

Wildlife encounters are becoming more and more frequent in urban areas, raising fear and concerns among local residents, and deepening the faultlines of man-animal conflict

- SREYA DEB

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 Ban-nerghatta 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