Want to chase monkeys in India? Apply at the Supreme Court

Monkeys are running amok in New Delhi, and the Supreme Court of India is determined to get to the root of the problem. The institution has invited “reputed housekeeping agencies of Delhi” to submit their tenders to fight monkeys blighting the Supreme Court judges’ homes.

The Supreme Court has published “a notice inviting tender from housekeeping agencies for engaging/hiring the services for providing the manpower for monkey scarers as and when required basis at the residential bungalows of honourable judges of the Supreme Court of India including guest house initially for a period of six months,” an ad notifies interested parties.

There are approximately 35 to 40 bungalows to be protected within a radius of three to four kilometres from the Supreme Court of India. The notice says monkey scarers “will be deployed as per the requirements or as and when required.”

The Supreme Court is interested in parties to submit quotes for time slots of eight hours a day, twelve hours a day, and twenty-four hours a day for 30 days.

The notice also announces that the initial contract for six months “may be extended for a further period” if the services are found to be “satisfactory and as per requirements,” saying that the rates shall be valid for a year from the tender and not be subject to change.

“Tender documents & Financial Bid for providing the services for Monkey Scarers” are expected at the Supreme Court by March 24, 2022 by 3 PM local time.

Monkeys are not a new menace in New Delhi. In an article initially published in Motherland magazine in December 2011, a journalist narrates his own brushes with monkey gangs who attacked the plants on his terrace and terrorised him in his home.

The writer also recounts the story of the then deputy mayor Sawinder Singh Bajwa who died in October 2007 while trying to fend off monkeys from the balcony of his home.

That’s not all –  there was another monkey who bit 25 people single handedly over a weekend in November 2007 in Shastri Park in East Delhi. He met an ugly end, when “people eventually beat him down with metal bars and sticks because they feared it was going to snatch infants away.”

Delhi’s monkeys were brought under a semblance of control when the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) and The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) hired more monkey catchers, increasing the number of their employees from five to more than 50, as well as raising the reward for each animal caught to as much as Rs 650 (approx $8.60).

Monkey catchers from across India rely on private contractors as go-betweens, because monkeys are revered as gods: “not many would want to be cruel to Lord Hanuman, the monkey god, the god of strength,” he writes.
The monkeys that are caught have a pleasant future ahead of them in a monkey sanctuary on the outskirts of Delhi. 

But are the monkeys at fault? No, it is most likely human interference that causes monkeys to act this way. “The MCD and NDMC’s inability to see the root of the monkey problem means that monkey catchers with cages, bait and sticks only make the problem worse; dividing groups makes them more aggressive,” he writes.

“And catching and releasing them elsewhere also spreads the problem, as do langurwalas, introduced in 2001, whose langurs frighten off the smaller rhesus monkeys, and send them running.”

The sanctuary may help with the problem, but the monkeys can, and often do, break out of ‘jail.’ Yet the fruit trees planted there are not yet grown enough to feed the monkey population, and there is a Hanuman temple nearby whose offerings tempt the monkeys.

The Supreme Court has its hands full with the monkeys wreaking havoc in the residential complexes, so let’s hope that the monkey scarers will be enough to keep the primates away – for now.