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Journalism of Courage
A 4-year-old girl was killed in a leopard attack in Shirur taluka of Pune district on Tuesday evening, when she was playing in the open yard in front of her house next to a sugarcane field. This is the ninth death and sixth of a child in human-leopard conflict in Junnar forest division this year.
The incident took place around 7pm on Tuesday in Pimpalsuti village of Shirur taluka, around 85 kilometres from Pune city. Forest Department officials have identified the deceased as Raksha Ajay Nikam (4), whose father is a farmer.
“The girl was playing in the open yard in front of their house. At the time there was no power supply in the area. The girl was suddenly attacked by a leopard, which was hiding behind a tree cover. As the leopard started dragging the girl away, the girl’s mother who was nearby raised an alarm… A search was launched for the girl and the villagers informed the forest department officials,” said Amol Satpute, deputy conservator of forest, Junnar division.
The dead body of the girl was found after a search that went on for over an hour. “We have beefed up patrolling in the area. We have deployed 10 trap cages, 10 camera traps, and drone cameras to find and capture the leopard,” said Satpute.
With this latest incident, the number of human deaths in human-leopard conflict in Junnar has risen to nine for this year with six of them being children. With two more deaths in Pune division, the number of deaths in human leopard conflict in Pune district has reached 11 this year.
With a growing leopard population in the Junnar forest area in Pune leading to increased incidents of human-leopard conflict in the region, the Maharashtra forest department has sent a proposal to the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) to sterilise 36 female and 11 male leopards as a targeted birth control method to bring down the rate of increase of leopard population.
In June this year, Pune District Collector had notified over 230 villages from four talukas of Pune district — Junnar, Ambegaon, Shirur and Khed — as prone to disaster due to repeated incidents of human-leopard conflicts, in which multiple deaths and several serious injuries were reported.
Considering the large number of leopards in the vicinity of Kukdi and Ghod River, Junnar forest department has been repeatedly appealing to the residents of Junnar, Shirur, Ambegaon, and Khed talukas to follow key precautionary steps. These include installing plenty of bright lights around each home and in the fields whereever possible, completely clearing the grass cover on both sides of the road around the houses and the fields, using toilets inside the house, avoiding going outside before dawn and after sunset as far as possible, and carry a flashlight and a sturdy stick if stepping out.
