While city dwellers wake up in the morning using various alarms to get ready for their respective professions, this is not the case in the villages of Doda. Here, monkeys have kept people on their toes from daybreak until twilight. Every day, there is a constant wild-goose chase between monkeys and people, each trying to outsmart the other. The monkeys are often more successful, as the fields are spread across the hills and cannot be completely guarded by manpower alone. While people guard their fields like sentries at police posts, the monkeys are numerous and clever enough to snatch bites here and there, often unnoticed by the guards.
The boys and I from my village grew up doing our homework and memorization after school while guarding our kitchen gardens and fields. Those were tough times, balancing studies with reconnaissance. As soon as we would finish reading a paragraph, some part of the field would be attacked, and we had to rush to chase the monkeys away. Some boys became so skilled at reconnaissance and running in these steep areas (greater than 50 degrees) that they qualified for army recruitment. Others, who couldn’t qualify, are still juggling their studies with field patrols.
The title may sound humorous, but it is true to some extent. While monkeys have indeed improved the cardiovascular health of the people here, many have been left with broken limbs from accidentally falling or skipping a step during these fierce encounters. The time and effort put into such seemingly useless activities by so many people, just to save these organic crops, should logically yield hefty sums in local markets, but that is hardly the case. We often hear about Indians making it big in tech, but people rarely know about this part of India, where individuals tackle the monkey menace with stones and loud shouts, leaving their voices hoarse, regardless of gender. As climate change becomes a reality, it is well known that it has an unprecedented effect on vulnerable populations (the poor, women, and children). Similarly, monkeys significantly impact these vulnerable groups, as they spend most of their time driving them away.
Regarding solutions, people here have tried many: from using dogs and firecrackers to sprinkling chili on vegetables and fruits, from using scarecrows to throwing stones, but the monkeys have outsmarted them all.
In 2018, 250 villages in the Jammu division reported losses of farm produce worth Rs 33 crore due to monkey raids, according to Department of Agriculture. In the last ten years, there has been a significant increase in the monkey population, attributed to climate change, increased urbanization, the destruction of their natural habitats, and the practice of feeding monkeys as a religious act. There are rumors that some people have even brought monkeys in trucks and left them here.
An internet search offers solutions like solar fencing, non-lethal electric fencing, monkey repellents, monkey scare guns, and laser-guided alarms, but these solutions seem less practical, and even if they were, farmers here can barely afford them. What has truly saved us all these years are small stones and Pahari dogs. But what people here really need now is coordination among various state departments, such as agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, and wildlife, which are subject-matter experts in handling situations like this. With positive intervention from these departments, we can finally reach a solution, whether by providing subsidized kits to farmers, declaring monkeys as vermin, or something else entirely.
(The views expressed in this article are author’s own, doesn’t reflect that of The Chenab Times)
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Rohit Raina is an engineering graduate and contributor at The Chenab Times.
