Monkey batters landfall in Luytens

NEW DELHI: In New Delhi, this weekend is going to be a busy time for the 20 Presidents and Prime Ministers and the odd king and at least one dictator attending the G20 summit.

But it will also be a working weekend for the 40 or so professional monkey chasers who have been called up by the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) to shoo away the monkeys of Lutyens Delhi.

These skilled personnel will keep the summit venues clear of rhesus macaques so that the leaders can ruminate undisturbed over pressing global issues such as climate change and war.

Life-size pictures of langurs, another species of monkey that macaques steer clear of, will be put up on roads leading to the venue and monkey chasers will patrol the perimeter making langur noises. It’s going to be a very interesting summit.

This move by the NDMC is typical of the sort of pointless Potemkin actions municipalities take to impress visiting high dignitaries. Along with all of the other sprucing up being done, the anti-macaque measures are hardly likely to be noticed by the dignitaries—or even by the rhesus monkeys themselves.

After years of hearing homosapiens impersonating langurs—no insult meant to the latter—they can’t be faulted for growing weary of the prank.

They’ve been known to take a banana break when a silly man comes along singing ‘eeb allay oo’ and return after the prankster has passed. As everyone who’s lost a Birkin bag at a temple knows, macaques are quick learners.

Heck, they are reputed to tell Chanel Cinq from Karol Bagh knockoffs; what chance do NDMC primates have?

But, of course, we forget that NDMC means all this only cosmetically; no real menace is meant to the macaques. When the big leaders have gone home, the monkeys can get back to business as usual in Lutyens’ Delhi.

As for the thousands of troops that have colonised all of New Delhi’s suburbs and indeed hundreds of cities, towns and villages across the country—pillaging farms, spreading rabies and menacing children— it will take more than a faux primate to persuade them to go back to the (non-existent) forests.

Not just in India but everywhere else, Government Man has just not evolved to the point where he truly realises he has upended the evolutionary applecart and that the rhesii are only picking the spillovers.

Let’s start with data. We don’t have any numbers for the macaques that have occupied our municipalities. We haven’t even managed to count our own numbers yet.

We have monkey estimates in the wild because the forest department does the count there. But city monkeys go uncounted. We have no data on their reproductive rates, nor any input on the behavioural and dietary changes that have occurred due to life amidst human populations.

To get a sense of the scale of the problem, we have a 2015 report by the Primate Research Centre in Jodhpur that India’s cities record about 1,000 monkey bites every day.

So the municipalities play it by the ear and their actions to keep the streets clear of macaques range from the fatuous, like calling in monkey chasers, to the feeble, like ‘relocating’ the simians—which is tantamount to taking the problem from here to there.

We may be hosting the most powerful men in the world, but municipalities’ policymaking on real urban issues like monkeys, dogs and flooding continues to be rooted in the medieval age, with no input from primatologists, animal behaviourists, climate change specialists.

Modern-day menaces continue therefore to have the run of our cities, and citizens can’t be blamed for taking the primate caller for entertainment and making friends with the macaques by offering them a banana.