Eight-year-old Mastan is the boy who survived. On a November evening last year, a leopard attacked Mastan just outside his home in Beninagar village of Balrampur district, Uttar Pradesh. The felid caught him by the left shoulder and dragged him into the nearby jungle. His mother Savrunissa ran out into the street, raising an alarm. When neighbours arrived, with lathis and lanterns, they found Savrunissa locked in a desperate tussle with the animal. The commotion distracted the leopard and the mother snatched away her boy from certain death. Mastan lived to tell the tale.

Others have not been so lucky. Four days before the incident, 15km from Beninagar, the leopard had killed seven-year-old Puja in Jhamoria village after carrying her away from outside her home at dusk. After a day’s search, her body was found in the sugarcane fields. In one week in November, the same leopard reportedly struck thrice in different villages before being trapped.

Over the past year, at least 12 human kills — mostly children — have been reported in Balrampur district. In 2013, too, 10 people died in what were described as leopard attacks. More recently, there have been similar reports from Junnar taluka, Pune district, Maharashtra. Since April, three children have been attacked, leaving one dead.

For months after the attacks in November, Balrampur district was seized by panic. Local reports wrote of dehshat — an apt term to describe the spread of paranoia — in at least 75 villages in Gaisri and Haraya Sadhrawa blocks. This region in the northernmost Terai belt of Uttar Pradesh, bordering Nepal, was seeing an unusual spate of leopard attacks. Daily life was hit. Shops closed before dusk and farmers returned earlier from their fields. Children stopped attending school. Government primary and upper primary schools in Gaisri registered zero attendance.

One of the reasons cited for the rising number of leopard attacks is that the felines are ‘straying’ from their territories. Sohelwa wildlife sanctuary — spread over 452 sq km across the districts of Shravasti, Gonda and Balrampur — is home to 70 leopards. According to the Balrampur forest division, leopards have been regularly ‘straying’ into the densely populated district, increasing the chances of human-animal conflict. At 642 persons per sq km, the district’s population density is higher than the national average.

In February, BL ink visited Balrampur, to follow the children slowly making their way back to school, cutting through sugarcane and mustard fields and jungles.

Rise in numbers

Recent figures show an increase in the number of big cats and this, in turn, is creating new problems for wildlife management. Big cats are moving out of Protected Areas and seeking expanded territories. In Gir, the census found more than 200 lions outside the sanctuary and a recent Wildlife Conservation Trust camera-trap exercise reported the presence of tigers outside Maharashtra’s Protected Areas.

The leopard too is changing its spots. There are no official numbers, but India is home to an estimated 10,000-20,000 leopards (though the numbers have fallen by 70-80 per cent in the last 100 years). Predator attacks are being reported from the Terai belt to Maharashtra, because it appears that increasingly the leopard is equally at home in sugarcane fields, village streets, parks as it is in the forest.

The attacks have obviously scared villagers, leading to protests in Maharashtra and the beating to death of a leopard in UP. The reasons for the attacks remain unknown. Villagers speculate that leopards mistake children for small animals. Forest officials obfuscate and say that the predators are translocated either to other areas or even the zoo. According to the international wildlife organisation Panthera, among the big cats, leopards are killed the most. The animal will stray out of designated areas. The question is how will humans carve out a coexistence? The case of the ‘straying’ leopard raises several questions: What constitutes the ‘wild’ now? Why is the leopard entering human-dominated territories? How can we tell apart a man-eating leopard from the others? And importantly, how can children continue going to school without being afraid of attacks?

Off to school

Three months after the leopard attack, in February, Mastan — who still bears the scars on his calf and shoulders — had not returned to school. The government primary school sits on the edge of the village, flanked by Mastan’s semi- pucca home and the jungle. Across the road, fully-grown sugarcane crops stand tall. Harvesting has begun. On the day the leopard struck, a goatherd had spotted it thrice, crossing the village street to disappear into the sugarcane crop.

At the school, attendance still hovers at a low 30 per cent. Students of classes III, IV and V sit in rows reciting single-syllable Hindi words that rhyme with kal — “ bal , hal , chal , jal , pal …,” they chant in unison. The younger ones, from classes I and II, sit in a huddle, waiting for their midday meal.

While Mastan is absent, cousin Salim hogs all the attention, narrating the sensational encounter to curious classmates and nosey reporters. Wrapped around his mother’s leg, Mastan leaves her side only to play a quick game of lagori , his shirt pocket spilling over with objects of all kinds — pebbles, matchboxes and dead cellphone batteries.

Puja’s father, Ram Anchal, in Jhamoria village, is also reluctant to send his younger children to school. In Jhauwwa village, where Mastan’s attacker was finally trapped, the primary school is located 3km away, in a forest clearing. Classes are held in the open.

Out of 105 students, only 40 have turned up. The children have heard of the attacks and the subsequent capture. “ Tendua bachchon ko khata hai (the leopard eats children),” says class V student Ram Darshan. “It sits on top of the school, opens its mouth wide and jumps,” he continues, as his classmates giggle. “That’s a monkey, the leopard is yellow and it has black spots,” corrects his friend Ramesh. Nandini, a class II student, says they were given instructions when the leopard was stalking the village. “ Sandhya ko na niklo , akele mat chalo (don’t step out alone after evening).”

The Beninagar leopard had settled in near the lake, just behind the school, often bringing its prey there. It was weeks before the leopard walked into the trap set up by the forest department. But the feline was not hunting alone. “It was a mother-cub duo,” says Rampal Yadav, a local Amar Ujala reporter, who was present when the leopard was trapped. “The cub wasn’t caught and villagers continue to report sightings of the lonely cub.”

Hindi teacher Anuradha Singh began working at the school in 2006. She lives across the school and her house has a clear view of the lake. “It is so difficult to concentrate on teaching. My two-year-old is at home alone but I have to take classes,” she says. “Adults don’t accompany the children to school. None of them have bicycles. I have spent the last few months in constant worry.” Even without a man-eater leopard on the loose, Singh says, they’ve enough problems to deal with. “We have to cook the midday meals. Course material and funds haven’t arrived yet. Students’ attendance is falling. We are providing for the school from our own pockets,” she says.

The schools in Jhauwwa and Beninagar don’t have playgrounds or electricity. The libraries have no books and the Jhauwwa school doesn’t have boundary walls. Jitendra Chaudhary, the block education officer. says, “The leopard attacks have only added to the problems.” In Gaisri’s 100-odd villages, schools that are already struggling to meet standards mandated under the Right to Education Act and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan are now also watching out for predators round-the-clock.

Lauki Kalan is one of the last villages on the Uttar Pradesh-Nepal border. On February 24 last year, Shyam Prakash’s four-year-old daughter was carried away by a leopard from their courtyard at dusk. The incident became an election issue after angry locals threatened to boycott polls. Villagers gathered at his tea-stall say there have been several more attacks subsequently. “A 15-year-old girl and another 11-year-old boy... We see the predator walking around almost every day,” says Janka, the cook at Lauki Kalan’s primary school.

After the leopard attack, the forest department had conducted small tours of the forest for the children. “They told us what tigers and leopards looked like. They told us to slide the grills of the classrooms and stay inside if the animals came close by,” says Sandeep, a class V student. Thirty-four-year-old Dipendra Chaturvedi travels 45km daily from Balrampur city to get to the school. The roads are bad and there is no water or electricity supply in these parts. “How can children get to school,” asks Chaturvedi. “We have trouble with attendance round the year. Once the sugarcane harvest begins, my students are employed in the fields. Now with man-eaters roaming around, the numbers have fallen further.”

Leopards don’t want to meet man

While villagers are doing all they can to stay clear of leopards, the animal is not particularly disposed towards humans either. A recent study titled ‘Adaptable Neighbours: Movement Patterns of GPS-Collared Leopards in Human Dominated Landscapes in India’ (published in PLOS ONE ), tracked the movements of five GPS-collared leopards, revealing that the feline takes great care to avoid humans. The villages in Gaisri block mostly have semi- pucca dwellings and the livestock sheds are not fenced. Many homes have hand-pumps installed in courtyards and are surrounded by farm or forestlands. Electricity is erratic. The darkness of the villages, the absence of clear boundaries, means leopards literally stumble into these pockets.

In almost all cases, the leopard attacked between dusk and dawn. Cows and dogs were picked up more frequently. Small children, under the age of 11, were killed or attacked outside their homes, near hand-pumps, or on the fringes of fields when answering nature’s call. The study shows that leopards, which are generally diurnal in forests, turned nocturnal near human habitations.

The authors of the study write that the two leopards living in the human-dominated landscape around Akole town (near Nashik) would travel five to seven times the distance at night than they would in the day. The distance the cats keep from the nearest urban dwelling during daytime is another indicator of their anxiety to avoid humans.

Another study by the Wildlife Conservation Society showed that leopard diet consisted mostly of domestic dogs, based on 85 samples of leopard poop. Nearly 87 per cent of their diet was made up of domestic animals, which means that the big cats are becoming dependent on human-related food sources.

Changing spots

Does this mean that the leopard is not ‘wild’? The leopard, or Panthera pardus , can easily adapt to different environments, from “open and semi-arid deserts, through savannahs to tropical forests.”

New research talks of the potential of multi-use landscapes like secondary forests and agri-forest systems to harbour wildlife. “These carnivores can thrive in multi-use landscapes,” writes leopard conservationist Vidya Athreya. While this explains why leopards are settling close to varied environments such as farmlands and villages, it doesn’t resolve the conflict raging in Junnar or Balrampur: why are the felines killing children?

According to guidelines from the Ministry of Environment and Forests on human-leopard conflict management, the leopard is considered a man-eater if it “picks up child from outside the house.” In November, the trapped Beninagar leopard was packed off to Lucknow. In most cases of human-animal conflict, forest departments use translocation to remove the problem animals from the affected areas. Conservationists question this approach and say that translocation could be one of the reasons for the increase in conflicts.

“Translocation is a scientific procedure meant for augmenting the population of species at the site of release and not for dealing with problem animals. This unscientific management of capture and releases only worsened conflict levels,” Athreya writes in her study ‘Is Relocation a Viable Management Option for Unwanted Animal? — The Case of the Leopard in India’. In the villages, however, the suspicion is that “the children looked like small, domestic and easy prey.”

Back at the Jhauwwa primary school, at 5pm, children pack up their books. They grab their friends and set out on the walk back home — Kusum walks with Poonam, Akash walks with Ramesh. Unescorted and unsupervised, the children try to walk in a single file. Some pick up sticks, some take the shortcut through the field. Some of them try to imagine where the predator might hide — behind that sal tree, or in the thicket. Kusum falls behind, her slipper is broken. What will they do when they reach home? “We can’t play outside, it’s forbidden. So we will go to our friend’s house and tell her what she missed at school. We will try to convince her to come back,” she says.

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