Kerala villages hit hard by wild boar attacks; Centre in no hurry to help

CK Sahadevan, the ward councillor of Sultan Bathery Municipality in Wayanad, was on his way home around 7 pm on March 14, when a wild boar jumped into the middle of the road. He lost control of his bike and fell down. Sahadevan, who was only a few kilometres away from Sultan Bathery town when the incident happened, is yet to recover from a serious head injury.

A few months ago, Sundaran, a newspaper agent, met with a similar accident at the same place. A wild boar hit his bike and Sundaran fell down. 

“Accidents caused due to wild boars and elephants crossing roads have become quite frequent in Wayanad,” said V Baby, district secretariat member of the CPI (M) and a close acquaintance of Sahadevan.

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Wayanad is not the only district in Kerala where people feel threatened by close interactions with wild animals, particularly wild boars.

Last month, an autorickshaw was hit by a wild boar at Neeleswaram in Kasargod, that too in the daytime. The animal ran amok, creating panic and fear. In December 2021, Rasheed, an auto driver at Koorachundu in Kozhikode, met with a similar accident and died of multiple injuries. A month before that, Mani Mathayi, a rubber tapper, was killed when attacked by a wild boar in a Palakkad rubber plantation. The outraged farmers staged a protest in front of the divisional forest office, demanding that the authorities put an end to the wild boar problem.

Man-animal conflict in numbers

Loss of life and crops due to human-animal conflict has become common in Kerala over the past few decades. The animals have come closer to human settlements due to factors such as climate change, depleting forest cover and expanding cities. 

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Between January 2021 and February 2022, 88 people died in the state due to human-animal conflicts, revealed a report tabled in the Assembly. According to the Kerala Economic Review of 2021, wild boars cause the third-largest number of human deaths due to man-animal conflicts in the state, followed by elephant attacks and snake bites. Wild boars killed eight people and injured 146 last year. About 1,900 incidents of crop damage were attributed to attacks from wild boars in the same year.

State, Centre at loggerheads

The wild boar menace has become a point of conflict between the Centre and the Kerala government. The state’s long-pending demand to declare wild boars as ‘vermins’ (nuisance) has not yet been approved by the Union Environment and Forest Ministry. 

Wild boar is an animal listed in Schedule 3 of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. According to the law, only the Union government has the authority to declare an animal listed in Schedule 3 as a vermin.  The state government will have a say only if the animal is moved from Schedule 3 to Schedule 5. However, the technicalities and legal complications in the matter weaken the state in dealing with the wild boar menace that causes loss of human life and crops on a daily basis.

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The state government has submitted several requests to the Union Environment Ministry, asking it to declare the wild boars that turn up in non-forest areas as vermin. AK Saseendran, the State Minister for Forest and Wildlife, told the Assembly that Kerala submitted the requests twice — in 2020 and 2021. The best the Union government did was to issue an advisory on the measures to be taken for effectively curtailing  human-animal conflict. 

Following this advisory, the state government formed jagratha samithis (vigilance committees) at the panchayat level to ensure the coordinated activity of various departments such as forest, wildlife, agriculture and local bodies in dealing with wild boar attacks. However, the attacks have only increased.

Saseendran met Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav last November, after which the Centre asked the state to submit a list of villages worst hit by wild boar attacks. Kerala has submitted the list and is now waiting for a favourable decision from the Centre, said Saseendran.

Farmers in a fix

“We are told that farmers and civilians can kill the wild boars if it is necessary, but there are a lot of restrictions and conditions which are almost impossible to meet,” said Thomas Verky, a farmer in Idukki district.

He and other farmers in his locality have suffered crop losses due to wild boars. The Wildlife Protection Act allows farmers to kill the animal in necessary situations but imposes stringent restrictions on the way to do it. Methods such as using explosives, electric fences and poisoning are prohibited under the Act. 

The aggrieved people may submit requests to forest and wildlife officials, who will then form a panel of trained people for shooting the boars. However, the panel members have to bear the penalty in the case of an accident caused during the shooting. “Who would take such a risk?” wondered John Verghese, a cardamom farmer at Nedumkandam in Idukki, while speaking to The Federal.

The technical and legal complications involved in dealing with the wild boar menace have left the farmers helpless, said Verghese.