NEW DELHI: Authorities in New Delhi have installed fake monkeys and deployed people mimicking their sounds to scare away real ones from venues linked to next week’s G20 Summit.
Delhi has a big monkey population and authorities hope that life-size cutouts of aggressive langur species will help prevent smaller macaques from disrupting the meeting of global leaders who will convene in the Indian capital on Sept. 9-10.
Most of the fake monkeys will guard the prime locality where top foreign officials will be staying.
Mimics will also be deployed there to keep monkeys away from nibbling on flower displays set up to welcome G20 participants and “ensure that they don’t bite anyone,” the New Delhi Municipal Corp. told Arab News.
“We have hired over 20 people who can mimic langur sounds … These people will be posted on the main ridge area called Sardar Patel Marg,” the corporation’s spokesperson Radha Krishan said.
Sardar Patel Marg connects New Delhi’s prime neighborhood and diplomatic enclave with the airport and will also be the main route to the G20 Summit’s venue, Pragati Maidan.
“This is the VIP route, and the attempt is so that monkeys don’t come out of the forest when prime ministers and presidents are taking this route,” said Nahar Singh Negi, a security guard who was installing the langur cutouts on Thursday.
“The monkeys have the habit of snatching things from people’s hands. These cutouts will discourage monkeys from coming out of the forest and creating nuisance.”
To the human eye, the cutouts are so lifelike that they can be easily mistaken for real langurs. But for the primates that rely also on other senses than sight, they might be less convincing.
“Humans imitating a langur’s voice might work out to an extent … (but) the cutouts and statutes would not deter monkeys. Animals depend on signals to react. They have animal instincts, and that instinct cannot be developed in response to cutouts,” said C.R. Babu, professor emeritus of the Delhi University’s Centre for Environmental Management of Degraded Ecosystems.
“Monkeys cannot receive any signal from a cutout; monkeys receive signals from living animals.”
It is not the first time that authorities in Delhi have tried to scare away monkeys.
During the Commonwealth Games in 2010, real langurs were patrolling the streets with their handlers to keep smaller monkeys at bay.
But the use of captive animals drew protests from rights activists, and professional langur impersonators have been occasionally used since then to guard parliament and other government buildings.
