The simian menace in Delhi and NCR seems to be going out of control as attempts to free the areas of monkeys have started getting on to residents of Noida and Ghaziabad.

For close to a year now, residents of many areas in Ghaziabad and Noida say they have been suffering from the menace. The priests of Shiv Mandir in Sector 11 in Noida say that nearly eight to ten people stand guard inside the temple with sticks during the Puja to make sure the devotees are not attacked.

Showing scratch marks on his back, the priest of Shiva Temple in Jhundpura, Noida, says, “On Friday, a monkey jumped on me and took away my cellphone and also scratched my back. I could not get back to work for close to two days.”

The Ghaziabad administration, however, is in a fix over how to deal with the monkey menace in the city. Even as the administration resumed its ‘Project Natkhat’ to free the city of primates competing for their space in the concrete jungle amidst protests by several animal activists to conserve wildlife, Director, Department of Forests (Ghaziabad), Sunil Kumar Dubey, requested Mayor Damayanti Goyal to hold a workshop on how ‘Humans should treat primates’. All this after S S Bajwa, the Deputy Mayor of Delhi, died trying to save himself from monkey attack on Saturday.

President of the Residents’ Welfare Association of Sector-11 in Noida, S R Sharma, said, “We hired a person to make sure that there is no trouble caused by the monkeys in our areas. But we do not know the people we should be hiring to catch them. If we can find that out with the help of the authorities, it could help.”

In Ghaziabad, meanwhile, residents of Govindpuram had hired a man who owned a langur to scare away the monkeys. Leelu, the owner of the animal, said, “Some people came in a van a few days back and took away my animal saying that keeping it was punishable under the cruelty to animals act and that I would be jailed if I refused to part with it.”

Ghaziabad Mayor Damayanti Goyal told Newsline that Aashima Sharma, district manager, People for Animals group, had opposed the use of langurs to drive away monkeys from residential areas and had referred to the Animal Atrocities Act to do so. She said, “Now that the District Magistrate has approved the move, the plan is back on track even though many groups are opposing it.”