The leopard question: Crisis or overreach?

Raju Korti
I write this as someone who has been a wildlife enthusiast from very early in life and who lives tantalisingly close to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, a region where leopards routinely stray into human spaces. During the COVID period one leopard slipped into our residential complex in the dead of night and on another occasion two cubs were spotted very close to the SGNP fringes, indicating the continued presence of an adult pair and reminding us that this is a living, overlapping habitat where the boundaries between human and wild are porous. Against this lived reality, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis recently directed officials to declare leopard attacks on humans as a state disaster and prepare a proposal for the next cabinet meeting that seeks to remove leopards from Schedule I and reclassify them under Schedule II so that officials have greater flexibility in dealing with confirmed man-eaters.

The announcement came after a high-level meeting attended by Deputy Chief Ministers Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar, Forest Minister Ganesh Naik and senior officials in the wake of rising leopard attacks, especially in Pune district’s Shirur tehsil under the Junnar forest division where three persons were killed in just over a month, triggering public outrage and even arson in which a forest department vehicle was torched. A man-eating leopard in this very tehsil was ultimately shot dead by sharpshooters in early November after repeated attempts to capture it failed.

(Pic representational)

The state has responded with a mix of immediate and structural directions: deploying cages in vulnerable areas, using drones to track leopards near villages and urban settlements, increasing patrols by police and forest personnel, expanding rescue teams and vehicles, enhancing the capacity of existing rescue centres like Gorewada in Nagpur, setting up two new rescue centres in Pune district within the next two to three months, and securing the Centre’s permission to sterilise man-eating leopards. District planning committees have been asked to fund cages, manpower and vehicles to intensify capture operations. These measures reflect the administration’s argument that Schedule I protection often creates operational challenges, particularly when officials have to deal with repeat offenders. The government says reclassification under Schedule II will streamline permissions and enable swift action, including sedation, capture, sterilisation or controlled removal of confirmed man-eaters.

The broader context makes the debate more urgent and more complicated. Maharashtra is home to one of the largest leopard populations in the country, with national and state estimates placing the number in the approximate range of 1,600 to 2,000 individuals depending on survey year and method. Yet an RTI-based report recently revealed that between January 2022 and September 2025, some 537 leopards died in the state from causes including road accidents, electrocution and poaching. At the same time localised attacks like those in Shirur overwhelm the administrative capacity of field officers and lead to sudden law-and-order flashpoints that the state struggles to contain.

As a Disaster Management Consultant, I feel that whether these incidents justify classifying leopard attacks as a “state disaster” demands a careful reading of disaster law. The Disaster Management Act allows states to notify calamities to unlock funds and coordinate responses, but typically disasters are large-scale events such as floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, radiation leaks or cyclones that exceed the coping capacity of local authorities.

Leopard attacks, although serious and tragic, are spatially concentrated and usually addressed through wildlife and forest management mechanisms. Declaring a state-wide disaster invites criticism as an administrative overreach unless supported by clearly documented evidence that the frequency, spatial spread and socio-economic consequences of attacks have grown beyond local handling. For a few tehsils where fatalities cluster, the “disaster” logic may hold; for a whole state it requires careful justification so that precedent does not dilute the very meaning of disaster classification.

Reclassifying leopards from Schedule I to Schedule II is an even more sensitive proposal. Schedule I confers the highest protection under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, imposing stringent penalties and permitting intervention only under narrow, well-regulated circumstances. Moving to Schedule II relaxes these constraints and allows more administrative discretion for capture, handling and lethal control. The state argues this is essential for quick and decisive action in conflict zones. The conservation community worries that the shift weakens deterrence against poaching, emboldens illegal killings and creates a permissive environment where the line between a confirmed man-eater and a merely sighted leopard becomes dangerously thin. The Shirur case, where a leopard was shot dead by sharpshooters, illustrates the slippery slope: when pressure mounts, lethal force becomes the path of least resistance.

Understanding why leopards enter human spaces is crucial to assessing the wisdom of such policy shifts. The primary drivers are habitat loss, fragmentation and decline in natural prey, all of which compel leopards to seek food near human habitation. In many landscapes, the prey base within forests is depleted due to habitat degradation and human pressure while stray dogs, cats, calves and goats near villages and city fringes provide easy pickings. Some leopards are old or injured and no longer capable of hunting wild prey; others become habituated to scavenging near human settlements, and in rare but documented cases, access to human corpses in cremation grounds or desolate areas can initiate dangerous behavioural changes. These ecological stresses, coupled with human encroachment into forested land and expansion of urban infrastructure, mean that leopards are often not invading human spaces but navigating a shrinking habitat mosaic in which humans have already advanced deep into their former ranges.

The contradiction at the heart of the government’s approach becomes clear here. On one hand it plans to ease legal protection, making removal easier; on the other hand, it promises to rehabilitate, treat and house leopards in newly constructed centres. Rehabilitation relies on strong legal safeguards because without them, capture can quickly slide into disappearance, and treatment into mere holding before euthanasia or unofficial disposal. If protections are diluted, the incentive to invest in long-term rehabilitation diminishes and the risk of leopards being killed under vague justifications rises. Poaching, already a documented threat, could exploit the relaxed schedule to mask illegal trade and killings under the guise of conflict control. This risk grows in landscapes already stressed by reported leopard mortality in the hundreds over just a few years.

The way forward lies not in blunt reclassification but in calibrated, evidence-led policy. Immediate measures such as cages, drones, increased patrolling and rapid-response teams are necessary to protect human lives and calm public anger. Long-term solutions must focus on habitat restoration, prey-base strengthening, secure wildlife corridors, strict action on encroachments, transparent protocols for defining and handling man-eaters, improved training of forest staff, rapid compensation for livestock loss, and community involvement in coexistence strategies. Scientific monitoring through camera traps, telemetry and GIS mapping should guide interventions. If any legal reclassification is pursued, it should be narrow, time-bound and limited to specific circumstances with independent oversight to prevent misuse.

Human safety is non-negotiable but conservation cannot be an afterthought. Treating leopard attacks as a “state disaster” and lowering their protection may produce short-term administrative convenience but could, if not tightly regulated, erode long-term ecological stability and legal safeguards. The real challenge is ensuring that compassion, science and law work together rather than at cross-purposes. Maharashtra’s response must rise to this complexity rather than simplify it, for if we reduce the debate to an administrative binary, both people and leopards will remain trapped in a cycle of conflict that neither emergency declarations nor legal downgrades can solve.