A family of three monkeys has become a regular, unsettling presence at a housing society in Mumbai's Powai, turning a private flat into their personal exploration ground and sounding a stark alarm about the city's vanishing green cover.
Uninvited Guests, A Clear Warning
The gentle pair, named Nandini and Nandgram, along with their playful baby Nandu, enter the Powai Cosmopolitan Housing Society almost every other day. They spend hours inside environmental activist Anamika Sharma's home, curiously exploring the space and nibbling on food offerings before leaving peacefully.
For Sharma, these repeated visits are not a simple nuisance but a dire ecological signal. "These animals aren't invading our spaces out of malice," she explains. "Their forests are shrinking. Their habitats are being encroached upon. They're simply coming to us because they have nowhere left to go." She describes baby Nandu's frustration when hungry as a universal cry for survival, linking the safety of human families directly to the protection of wildlife families.
A City Transformed, A System in Distress
The conservation platform NatConnect Foundation identifies this incident as part of a dangerous spiral in human-animal conflict. B N Kumar, director of NatConnect and a resident of the Mumbai–Navi Mumbai region for over 48 years, paints a vivid picture of loss. He recalls Powai as a lush, wooded valley with thousands of trees, a stark contrast to the current concrete end-to-end landscape.
"When you erase forests, wildlife will spill into homes, roads, and campuses," Kumar states. He points to broader evidence of a system breaking down:
- Recent leopard attacks in Mumbai's northern suburbs.
- The panic-driven killing of a leopard in Pune.
- The ongoing uncertain fate of Konkan elephant Omkar.
Both Sharma and Kumar have attempted to contact the forest department, urging the safe rescue and relocation of the monkey family to a natural habitat, rather than letting them adapt to a life in human residences.
A National Crisis Calling for Policy Reform
NatConnect Foundation has escalated the issue, filing a petition to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), which is now under process with the wildlife division of the union environment ministry. The petition, citing Omkar's case as an example, exposes structural gaps in India's wildlife management, including shrinking forests, broken animal corridors, and reactive capture policies.
The appeal urges comprehensive reforms in:
- Forest-edge regulation.
- Wildlife corridor protection.
- Scientific garbage management.
- A more scientific, less knee-jerk response to conflicts.
"The monkey issue may look trivial. But it's part of a national ecological crisis. PM Modi, being an animal lover, must take a serious view," asserts Kumar. The departure of these simian visitors from the Powai flat leaves behind a pressing, unanswered question for India's rapidly urbanizing landscape: who will protect wildlife as cities relentlessly expand into their last remaining habitats?
