With increasing leopard conflicts in the region, the forest department will establish a base camp at Mandavgan Farata for Shirur tehsil. The forest department, with several cages and camera traps, plans to deploy 15 personnel in this area, who will be responsible for immediate response in case of a human-leopard conflict.

The recent leopard sighting incident as well as the two human deaths due to leopard attack have raised concerns among the villagers of Shirur. Following the recent incident, the forest department faced severe backlash from villagers, accusing department officials of failing to respond timely to conflict scenarios and also failing to mitigate the conflict situation in Shirur.

Considering the urgency of the situation and to reduce response time during conflict incidents in Junnar, the forest department came up with the idea of ​​establishing another base camp at Shirur since the area required additional measures .

Talking about the base camp project, Smita Rajhans, deputy conservator of forest, said, “Mandavgan Farata is further away from the divisional office. After knowing about the incident on Saturday we deployed a team and some cages installed at Mandavgan Farata but for this the team had to travel 100 km and from Junnar division office the distance is around 125 km. The cages that are moved from our base camp in Pimparkhed village are also around 65 km from Mandavgan Farata village, requiring more time to mobilize and set up the system in the conflict zone.

In addition to a permanent base camp, a team of 15 people will be set up in the village of Mandavgan Farata, Rajhans said. All necessary resources will be made available in this base camp, which will help us reduce response time in the Shirur area and provide immediate support in the event of a conflict situation.