What was it like to see a leopard in the tea plantation?
“I was afraid”; “It jumped onto me from across the drain”; “It was beautiful”; It was so close, I could take a picture of it with my mobile phone”
These are a few responses that my different interviewees had in response to this question. Clearly, leopards can interact with people in the tea plantations of Assam in very different ways. Often, the negative interactions overpower the positive or neutral ones.
“I was attacked by a leopard in section 12 two years ago [17th May 2014]. I had gone to pluck tea leaves. It was a Saturday, and I had [finished work for the first half of the day]. I was walking back to work, and I saw the leopard in a plucking row [the gap between two rows of tea bushes]. It was across a drain, and it jumped onto me from the other side. I fell down, screaming. The people who were with me immediately took me to the hospital. I spent a week in the hospital, and then another week at home.”
This is the story of Jamuna, a tea plucker in a tea estate in Assam. Like her, many people in tea estates have been victims of leopard mauling. While there have been no fatalities and the injuries have been mostly minor, there seems to be a pervasive sense of fear among the people who live and work in the tea plantations with significant leopard populations.
“I am scared”, said Jamuna, “and am continuously afraid at work. Everyone else in my community is also afraid.”. Hamuk, a carpenter in the same plantation as Jamuna corroborated, “Who wouldn’t be afraid of leopards?”
In addition to this personal mortal fear, leopards also pose a threat to the residents’ livestock and pets. Livestock killings by leopards are quite common in plantations in which there is a regular leopard presence according to my interviewees.
In Limbuguri Tea Estate, where Jamuna and Hamuk work, there are some 3 or 4 leopards roaming about as well as a few cubs, according to the manager, Mridul Sharma. While the last human mauling happened in 2014, only last week five goats were killed in a section of the plantation known to be a hotspot for leopards. These cases of livestock killings seem to be quite normalised, however- all my interviewees seemed to be undisturbed by non-human losses. Suraj, a health worker from another tea plantation where there are very few leopards, even said that for him leopards were not a problem if they were not dangerous to human life, and that it was fine if they killed a goat or two occasionally.
While the resident workers of Limbuguri Tea Estate seem to be quite resigned to idea of having leopards co-exist with them in the plantation at the moment, 2 years ago, when Jamuna was mauled, the climate was much more tense.
“There was a huge hue and cry when the leopard attacks happened in 2014 [3 attacks had happened in close succession, including Jamuna’s mauling]”, said Manager Sharma. “There was a worker strike, because they felt that the management was not taking any action” he added. The workers demanded for trapping cages to be set up so that the leopards could be trapped and relocated. Company Director, Sajan Agarwalla, said that they did so promptly with the help of the Forest Department. Since leopards are protected species in India, it is illegal to interact with leopards without the mediation of the Forest Department. “The people had become emotionally outraged, said Agarwalla, “and so did not come to work for a day. But after that, it was fine”.
Setting up trap cages is the main way leopard human conflicts are addressed here. The standard protocol whenever a leopard moves into the plantation is for the Forest Department to be contacted, and for a cage to be a set up. The cage has two compartments, one empty- for the leopard, and the other with a bait goat. Once a leopard is caught, rangers from the Forest Department return and transport the leopard to a protected forest area. According to Agarwalla, last year 5-7 leopards were captured from Limbuguri Tea Estate itself.
However recent scholarship has shown that capture and relocations are quite harmful in the case of leopards. A study conducted in Western India concluded that translocating leopards from a human dominated landscape to adjoining forest areas could increase incidents of conflict (Athreya et al. 133). This is because the leopards in the study did not stay in the released area and became more aggressive post release (133). Capture and release remains the main strategy for solving conflicts in Assam.