CHENNAI: Three people have been injured in two separate incidents when jackals attacked people inside the IIT Madras campus. This seems to be the first conflict between man and jackal reported from the campus where deer and monkeys walkabout freely. Till now there have only been instances of deer becoming roadkill on IIT’s tarred pathways.
In the first incident, a jackal pounced on a man near the post office on campus. The man, identified as Gangareddy, had arrived on campus to visit a relative when the animal attacked him, bit him hard and tried to drag him into the woods. A pack of jackals were seen hanging close by, sources said.
An autorickshaw driver and a security guard who came to his rescue were bitten in the second incident that took place near the third loop road in the IIT campus.
Animal activist Antony Clement Rubin said the rare instances of jackals attacking man could be because the forest area within the IIT Madras campus has thinned down, mainly due to the damage caused by Cyclone Vardah last year. “The available forest in IIT Madras is highly degraded, fragmented and interspersed with human settlements. After the Vardah cyclone and the removal of Seemai Karuvelam (an African variety of thorny-shrub like trees that suck the land dry) following the High Court’s directions, large tracts of campus lost vegetation, leading to the destruction of the jackals’ natural habitat,” he said.
Jackals carry the rabies virus and these attacks are therefore of even greater concern, he cautioned. The IIT management must find a way out.
Sources in the forest department said the storm brought down a compound wall separating the IIT Madras campus and the Guindy National Park, which has led to the free flow of animals. A forest official blamed the IIT management for not doing anything immediately to repair the wall.
“There is a movement of wildlife from GNP to IIT Madras. We have asked the IIT Madras to fix problem on several occasions, but in vain,” he said.
Asiatic jackals (also known as golden jackals) are widely distributed in different parts of the country and live in a wide variety of habitats. They belong to Schedule III of the Indian Wildlife Protection Act (1972) and feature on the Red List of the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) in the category of ‘least concern’.
Though this is the first time a jackal attack case has been heard of from inside the IIT Madras campus, sources said that there had been an attack last week too, which never got reported.