With four leopards dead and two leopard attacks on humans in the last six months, officials at the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) are a worried lot. The park, sprawled across 109 sq km on the city’s fringes, is under pressure on multiple fronts—the leopard count is dwindling rapidly, residential development in areas like Thane and Borivali is closing in on the buffer areas around the forest, and there is still no final solution to encroachments within.

The most pressing problem is the leopard numbers. If 2001 and 2002 saw 42 leopards in the park, five years later the figure has gone down a mere 20. The reasons range from old-age deaths and man-animal conflict to accidents.

Incidentally, most of the deaths as well as leopard attacks have occurred in the Yeoor range of the park, which constitutes around 60 per cent of the forest. Since 2003, five leopards have died only along Ghodbunder Road after being hit by speeding vehicles. It’s a busy highway, connecting the western and eastern suburbs as well as the Mumbai-Ahmedabad Highway. The Yeoor range runs parallel to Ghodbunder Road, along which scores of residential colonies have sprung up over the past few years. The area adjacent to Ghodbunder Road, while not part of the Park area, was an extended lush zone serving as a buffer that has all but disappeared beneath high-rises and residential townships.

And it is the Yeoor range that has seen the deaths of four leopards since last October, following vehicle hits and instances of animal-man conflict.

“Another reason (for numbers falling) was that some 25-27 leopards were trapped in 2003-04 when there was a spate of incidents of leopard attacks around the park. So the figure came down by 50 per cent,” says Prashant Mahajan from the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS). These leopards have been either been kept in captivity at the SGNP or at the Rehabilitation Centre in Junnar, Pune. Twenty-two leopards are in captivity in the SGNP, including many captured from other forest regions.

However, Conservator of Forests P N Munde says the figure is fine. “The average capacity of the park is some 20-22 leopards. We also have to look at it according to the leopard-prey ratio.”

Munde says the bigger problem for Park officials is the shrinking forest owing to encroachers along the periphery. “There are some 3 to 4 lakh encroachers in the park. The High Court has given us the time till July so that we can remove the encroachments.” According to reports filed before the High Court last year, some 49,000 families had been removed and 11,658 were to be rehabilitated.

One solution was to build a 22-km wall along the park border. The construction of the wall has also been done, but half-heartedly. “We have completed the construction of 14 km of the wall. We are facing the problems as there is encroachment in some area,” says Munde.

Another rising concern is the recurring forest fires. Yeoor Range Forest Officer P R Masurkar says: “Ours is a deciduous forest. So we experience more leaf fall and it keeps on accumulating. So whenever a forest fire breaks out, it spreads. But other reasons behind the forest fires are miscreants straying into the forest.” The range has seen seven or eight incidents of fire since last Tuesday, but a final report on them is yet to be prepared.

“During this period (February-March) the khajoli plant, which causes a terrible itching sensation, also sheds its leaves. The seed burst results in itching. That’s one reason encroachers set fires,” says a forest guard, adding that fire-fighting techniques used are rather ineffective.

“With this, the hills are losing their green cover. More than natural causes, it’s the miscreants setting fires that is the bigger problem,” says Punam Singavi of the NGO Hariyali and an ‘honorary wildlife warden’ of the Forest Department. “When trees are burnt during the fire, the hills lose their soil cover, resulting in barren hills. These are ideal locations for encroachment.”