Months after the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) announced that it will hire monkey catchers on a payroll, the simian menace is still baffling the civic body as very few people turned up for the job.
According to officials, despite giving advertisements and fixing the monthly salary at Rs 15,000, few people showed interest in the job. "We thought if we hired a dedicated team to handle the work, the number of complaints would drop. But hardly four-five people have applied for the positions till now," a senior SDMC official said.
"Earlier, we used to hire monkey catchers on a contract basis and used to pay Rs 1,200 per monkey. But it was extremely difficult to retain any of the catchers for even a year at a stretch," he added.
When DNA contacted some monkey catchers or 'qalandars' to understand their side of the matter, most of them said that in the past, activists have taken them to police stations, and people have slammed them for hurting their "religious sentiments".
"It had become really difficult for us to catch monkeys as people in several areas of Delhi took offense. A group of activists once took me to a police station, while I was doing my job in the Parliament Street area," Salauddin, a resident of north-east Delhi's Dilshad Garden, said.
Echoing the sentiment, monkey catcher Irfan, who hails from Uttar Pradesh's Meerut district, said: "It becomes so difficult to do our job as a lot of people have their religious sentiments attached with monkeys. I was threatened by a group of residents in north Delhi once. I never visited the area again."
The civic body has been grappling with the simian problem for years now. Not just residential buildings, the monkeys have not spared even government organisations such as courts, office buildings, or the Parliament House itself. Recently, two monkeys had strayed into the multi-storeyed headquarters of the civic bodies and left several Councillors of north and south civic bodies stranded for hours.
At the same time, several monkey-catchers have started freelancing. "After 0the government imposed a ban on using langurs to catch monkeys, it became difficult for us to work. We now have to use sound techniques to nab them, which is a tedious process and requires more time. The municipal corporation used to pay me only Rs 850-1,200 for a monkey. Now, I am catching stray monkeys on my own and charging Rs 2,000 for one," Akram said.
No response from other states
The south corporation officials have said they have made multiple requests to the Chief Wildlife Wardens of the Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand, and Rajasthan, to provide then with monkey catchers but there has been no response.
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