Decades on, city still under siege by monkeys as relocation efforts falter

A 33-year-old government officer was critically injured on Monday after falling from the seventh floor of Shastri Bhawan while trying to escape a monkey attack.

- Paras Singh and Jasjeev Gandhiok

The man, who was on a phone call near a balcony when the animal startled him, lost balance and plunged down ~ the incident a reminder of the 2007 case when Delhi's deputy mayor SS Bajwa died after being attacked by monkeys at his home in Vivek Vihar.

The Bajwa case had pushed the Delhi High Court to direct relocation of monkeys to the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary. But nearly two decades later, and despite claims that more than 25,000 rhesus macaques have been shifted there, Delhi continues to live under a simian siege.

The years-old relocation programme has moved at a crawl, experts and officials said, hampered by a shortage of trained catchers, legal disputes over who controls the issue, and the absence of barriers at Asola, which has no natural food sour-

ces and no fencing, allowing monkeys to return easily to the city.

The result, officials explained, has led to patchwork of improvised measures by agencies ~Langur cutouts at intersections, hired workers to chase monkeys away from VVIP areas ~ exposing the administrative failure.