Nilgiris: A day after a three-year-old child was killed in a leopard attack, local residents have intensified the protest in Tamil Nadu's Pandalur seeking immediate action to kill the animal. A large number of people laid siege to the Kozhikode-Gudalur National Highway on Sunday morning.
The agitators have declared that the child's body would not be cremated unless authorities took action to eliminate the leopard threat in the region. The dawn-to-dusk hartal saw the entire area shut down in protest.
On January 5, the Tamil Nadu Forest Department issued an order to capture the animal in tune with the National Tiger Conservation Authority guidelines and release it to the jungle in the interior forests. The Divisional Forest Office at Gudalur received the order on Saturday and officials started measuring to capture the animal soon. But the entire situation worsened as the animal had killed the girl on Saturday evening.
According to the order of the Chief Wildlife Warden, a special committee under the chairmanship of the Conservator of Forests and Field Director, Muthumalai Tiger Reserve will be assigned to capture the straying leopard in the Cherambady and Bitherkad forest ranges of Gudalur forest division. The animal should be chemically immobilized and translocated to the interior forests as per section 11 (I) and the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, reads the order.
The health condition of the captured leopard should be taken into consideration and after that, the leopard should be released in the wild. "The entire operation shall be photographed and video recorded", pointed out the order.
However, leaders of the agitators demand an order to shoot and kill the leopard as soon as possible, as releasing the animal into another forest region means the repetition of tragedies in another area. Aliyar Maliyekkal, president of Tamil Nadu Merchant Association, Pandalur taluk, told Onmanorama that capturing and releasing the animal again into the wild will not be allowed at any cost.
One of the protesters alleged that police manhandled the parents of the child during an agitation on Saturday night. Police removed the protesters who laid siege to the road after traffic through Nadukani Ghat road was blocked for hours.
Nancy (3), daughter of Jharkhand native Shivshanker was killed in the leopard attack on Saturday. The child and her mother were walking back home from Anganwadi through the tea plantation when the animal attacked them. Though the mother saved the daughter from the animal, the girl who suffered deep injuries on the neck, died on the way to the hospital.
This was the third leopard attack in the past two weeks, people said. A leopard attacked three women on December 21 at Elamanna near Kolappalli and one of them succumbed to the injuries later. On Thursday, an animal mauled Karthika, a four-year-old child playing in the front yard of her home. The child was admitted to the Taluk Hospital, Pandalur., with deep wounds. The animal left the child when people suddenly rushed to save the child.
Countless cases of cattle-lifting were also reported from the region in the recent past, people said.
Though the public has been demanding capturing the animal after tranquillizing it as the animal evaded the cage traps laid by the forest department personnel in the locality, the forest department had cold-shouldered it, alleges the villagers.
