Hyderabad: The monkey threat has escalated outside cities and temple towns, is affecting rural areas and causing widespread trouble among farmers. Apart from horticulture crops, monkeys did not attack like corn and rice fields.
In many villages, hundreds of monkeys land on the farm, eat some parts of the fruit, and then leave the rest. The damage was so severe that some farmers stopped growing certain crops or gave up on agriculture.
Previous corn-growing farmers in the United Kema region, especially from Medipally, Mudagonda, Enkoor, Tallada, Bonakal and Raghunadhapalem, lost huge losses in the last Rabi season. Monkeys usually attack corn crops about 3 to 4 months old.
The traditional and unconventional attempts adopted by farmers scare nocare monkeys – using Langurs, Sound Systems, wearing animal masks, etc. – because monkeys have begun to attack crops from large troops in hundreds of people.
Some farmers hired guards, but they also did not stop the monkeys from attacking the crops.
A major event was narrated, and Kandula Bhaskara Rao, a farmer from the village of Venkatapuram in Mudagonda Mandal said that more than 500 monkeys attacked corn crops belonging to the farmers. When the farmer couple rushed to the village to bring more people to scare the village, the monkeys damaged crops on the entire 1.5 acres of land in two hours. “They damaged the crops many times,” Bhaskara Rao said.
Bhaskara Rao noted that farmers are now more concerned about monkeys than seasonal rain and hail, saying that monkeys even start to destroy rice fields when they reach their maturity stage. He added that farmers who cultivate mango, guava and Subabul are farmers of the region’s main crops and are also severely affected by the threat of monkeys.
In the United Kema region, farmers have caused huge losses on about one hundred thousand acres of land, said Battu Purushhottam, the leader of the migrant trade union. He urged the government to rescue farmers by taking population control measures to inspect the growing monkeys.
He said the region’s expanding granite industry is another major reason for monkeys to move to rural areas, as the industry has resulted in a large number of trees being cut down.
M. Kodanda Reddy, chairman of the Telangana Farmers Committee, observed that the solar fence of farmland is the only solution to checking the monkey threat, although it is expensive.
Since monkeys are related to religious sentiment, serious measures are difficult to take. He said the government will try to provide subsidies to farmers to install solar fences in major affected areas of the state from next year.
The Telangana High Court recently took Suo Motu’s awareness of the issue after PIL, based on a letter from Telangana Rythu Samasyala Sadhana Samithi, and directed the state government to outline the steps taken to curb the growing monkey threat. Urge the government to consider planting fruit-containing trees in forest areas to relocate monkeys and establish compensation plans for affected farmers.
