The Madras High Court on Monday sought the response of the State government to a public interest litigation petition which sought to restrain the forest department officials from capturing deer from Central Leather Research Institute (CLRI) campus and other places in Chennai for the purpose of relocating them.
A Division Bench of Justices M. Sathyanarayanan and N. Seshasayee ordered notice on the PIL petition filed by animal lover S. Muralidharan of Kottur Gardens here. In his affidavit, the petitioner stated CLRI was located on 75 acres of land close to the Guindy National Park, Children’s Park and the Snake Park in the city.
According to the petitioner, the entire area around these institutions was once a forest land. During British rule, the Governor of East India Company William Langhorne had built a lodge which was now named Raj Bhavan and being used as the incumbent Governor’s official residence.
Originally forest area
Over a period of time, large extent of forest area was fragment and handed over to various institutions. A portion of the forest land was allocated to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1958 and about 2.7 square kilometres was carved out for the establishment of the country’s smallest national park.
Deer could be spotted in the Raj Bhavan, the Guindy National Park, IIT-M, Anna University as well as CLRI. The absence of predators in Chennai city was also an additional factor for the large population of deers. However, too many construction activities in IIT-M and Anna University in the last two to three decades had led to the deer population spilling over to neighbouring areas like Velachery, Taramani, Adyar, Kotturpuram, Nandanam, Saidapet, Ekkattuthangal and Perungudi, the petitioner said.
The spotted deer got acclimated to human habitation and started feeding on garbage.
Crude methods
“I state that Chennai is the only urbanized city in the whole country to have 1,500 deer in its midst,” the petitioner said and accused the forest officials of having adopted crude methods for capturing and relocating the deer.
“Deer is a very sensitive animal.The rate of mortality is high when deer are caught and relocated. The low survival rate is also attributed to injuries sustained during capture and transportation,” his affidavit read. It said the Forest Department had captured 150 deer from Chennai in the month of June and relocated them to Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve where the deer population had dwindled. The petitioner claimed that the practice was erroneous since the deer, accustomed to urban areas, would not survive in the wild.