A six-year-old girl has died after a troop of monkeys chased her off the roof of her home in Karnataka, northern India.
Kirti was sunbathing with her grandfather Chandrapal on the second floor when monkeys pounced on them Saturday morning.
The youngster fled from the cartload of primates only to tumble off the terrace of her family home in Sirsi, a town in the Uttar Pradesh district.
She was rushed to hospital but was declared dead on arrival.
A family member told the Times of India: ‘She was chatting with her grandfather, Chandra Pal, on the house terrace while others were working downstairs.
‘All of a sudden, we heard Kirti screaming for help.
‘Before we could climb upstairs, we heard a loud thud and found her in a pool of blood.’
Kirti’s father, Kamap Deep, said the little girl tried to escape to the stairs.
‘There was nothing we could do,’ the farmer added.
Local officials, Deep claimed, aren’t doing much to support residents who are being terrorised by the animals, with stray dogs also posing a problem.
Sambhal district hospital bosses say up to seven people are arriving at the facility who have been injured by monkeys, the Hindi-language newspaper Amar Ujala reported.
Nagar panchayat councillors, akin to a municipal council, have twice approved motions to catch the wild monkeys.
Kausar Abbas, the council’s chairman, says federal forest officials have given them the go-ahead and a team of monkey catchers will be sent from Mathura.
Karnataka has long been home to primates who call the state’s dense forests, patchwork of ginger, areca nut and coconut farmlands and urban spaces home.
But human-monkey clashes have been on the rise for years. So much so that ‘monkey menace’ is an all too common phrase used by locals, politicians and the press alike.
Farmers growing crops by the Western Ghats mountain range have long been given headaches by the monkeys, such as the spritely bonnet macaques notorious for picking at their crops.
In a bid to avoid major losses to the agriculture sector, farm workers across the state have taken the problem into their own hands – in 2020 alone dozens of monkeys were killed in districts along the Western Ghats.
Experts say scuffles between humans and wild monkeys are inevitable as people continue to build farmland and roads right through their natural habitats.
With their forests dwindling and nowhere else to go, the fields of crops are essentially all-you-can-eat buffets for the primates.
Researchers warn that as farmers and city officials tear down the woods and monkeys go from once sacred animals to pests, some monkey populations are decreasing.
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