The members of Uttarakhand Assembly expressed concern on the ever increasing loss to the farmers due to the wild animals during the discussion on the Budget on Wednesday.
Raising the issue under rule 58, the deputy leader of Congress legislature party, Karan Mahra said that the people in the mountainous areas are being forced to shun agriculture due to menace of the wild animals like monkeys and wild boars.
He further said that the State Government does not seem to have any concrete plan to deal with the very important issue. The Congress MLA Furkan Ahmed said that the farmers of the plain areas are also facing the same problem. Kedarnath MLA, Manoj Rawat said that surprisingly enough, the State Government is banking on the age-old practice of sterilisation of monkeys. This was unthinkable in the scientific age, he said.
He further said that in view of the premier institutes like Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar being located in Uttarakhand, the State Government should place their suggestions, if any, in the House.
In his reply, the State Parliamentary Affairs Minister Prakash Pant said that the State Government is aware of the man-wild life conflict and its consequences. He informed that a total of 3,320 monkeys have been sterilised while 24800 have been shifted out of human habitations in the wild by the forest department. The Minister added that on November 13, 2018, the Government had declared wild boars as vermin. “Now the farmers can kill them if they intrude their farms,” he said.