Monkeys run riot in Kukundoor

Kukundoor is a small village around forty five kilometers away from the university town of Manipal. It falls under the Karkala taluk and has a population of around ten thousand. An hour long bike ride along State Highway SH37 took us to the village that has been facing a serious problem for the past few months now.

Jeevan, a resident of Kukundoor works at the Bola Raghavendra Kamath and Sons Cashew kernel manufacturing and exporting company.But he started working at the factory only about a month ago.He previously was a farmer and earned from whatever his small tobacco farm yielded. For about the last six months a lot of farmers in villages around Karkala have faced immense losses due to invading monkeys who destroyed their crops and often also attacked them and their family members.

Statistically, according to the Karkala Assembly Constituency, Over 800 small-scale farmers have given up cultivation and two of them ended their lives due to crop loss caused by monkeys. Crops worth Rs 5 crore are said to be damaged by monkeys in Karkala alone. About 1,400 acres of fertile land have not been cultivated in the area due to fear of damage to crop from monkeys. About 1,800 farmers are living in abject poverty, unable to pay bank loans.
In some areas, children have stopped going to schools fearing attacks from monkeys. There is widespread absenteeism in cashew factories, beedi manufacturing units, areca sorting centres and even in agricultural operations. Monkeys chase the children and snatch their lunch boxes and books, sometimes after attacking the children.

Suresh, a monkey catcher, was called in from Manchi village near Udupi to tackle the issue but the number of monkeys around the region is so high that it is impossible for one person to deal with the situation now. Under the guidance of forest officials, some villagers though have devised a plan to drive the monkeys back to forests in the Western Ghats.

"If they do not go back, they will be caught and rehabilitated in the monkey park to be built in the Kudremukh National Park " says Jeevan. Kudremukh National Park is one of the largest national parks in india located in the Chikmaglur district of Karnataka. Since there was no contact information available of the Kudremukh National Park on the internet, we could not confirm whether work for the monkey park has begun there yet.

The locals believe that the main reason for these monkey invasions over the past year or so is depletion of food sources in the wild. To prevent them from entering the main farmlands, farmers like Jeevan are now planting wild fruit bearing trees on the village edges away from the farms to distract these groups of monkeys.

On our trip to Kukundoor, we did not witness an invasion as such but we saw a couple of stray monkeys on treetops around the farms. Jeevan said the rains generally kept the pack away, probably why it was a day of relief in Kukundoor.



A special thanks to my friend Veerendra Neeli of 1st year M.S.Communication, MIC for helping out with the translations that made it so much easier to communicate with the locals at Kukundoor that gave us an insight of the threat they face today.