As wild animal attacks surge across Jammu and Kashmir, 278 deaths and thousands of injuries over two decades, survivors face not just trauma but financial ruin, reports Asrar Sayed
Shaheena no longer visits her family orchard in Ganderbal. She has been attacked there twice by a black Himalayan bear, and the second time, she may have paid with her eyesight. Her husband, Jhon Mir, had to travel all the way to Delhi for her treatment after the first attack, which left her hospitalised for more than a month and bedridden for almost half a year. “Her whole stomach area had been damaged,” Mir recalled. “It took months for her to recover completely.”
The first attack had come without warning, the way these things do. Shaheena was in the orchard attending to routine work when the bear appeared and struck. The injuries to her stomach were severe enough to require extended hospitalisation and a prolonged period of enforced rest at home. In the months that followed, she carried not only the physical damage but the memory of it, a fear that settled into the body alongside the healing.
After the first attack, Shaheena decided once for all that she will never go to the orchard alone. For years she kept the promise. Then one Friday afternoon, with no male members at home, she made a quick decision to check on the water storage. She moved through the orchard, her heartbeat rising as she neared the spot where she had been attacked the first time. Then she saw the bear, resting near one of the trees. She panicked and screamed. The bear attacked.
“The bear directly slapped her face and neck,” said Mir. “Her eye had suffered serious corneal damage which has lately caused her serious pain at times.” Full recovery is no longer certain. The orchard that her family depends on has become, for Shaheena, a place she may never return to again.
Shaheena’s story is not an aberration. Across Jammu and Kashmir, the sight of wild animals in residential areas has become, if not ordinary, then at least familiar. Mosque loudspeakers announce leopard sightings. Local WhatsApp groups send out bear warnings. Children in affected areas are kept indoors after 6 pm. What was once an occasional rural hazard has become a spreading, quantifiable crisis.
Rising Numbers
Between 2003 and 2005, there were 203 recorded cases of human-wildlife conflict across Jammu and Kashmir. Between 2023 and 2025, that figure has climbed to 15,661. The scale of that increase, from 203 cases in two years to over 15 thousand in roughly the same span, marks something more than a gradual worsening. It marks a structural shift in the relationship between human settlements and the wild animals that surround them.
Over the longer arc, from 2006 to March 2024, the Department of Wildlife Protection recorded 264 human deaths and 3,164 serious injuries. Adding the most recent government data for 2024-25, which records 14 more deaths and 214 injuries, the toll since 2006 reaches 278 dead and thousands more permanently scarred. These are people who were farming, walking, playing, or simply present in spaces they had always considered their own.
The geographic spread of the crisis is wide. In the Jammu division, which has been among the worst affected during the 2023-25 period, over 2,785 cases have been reported. Kishtwar follows with 1671, and Doda with 1435. In the Kashmir division, Kupwara leads with 1,425 cases, followed by Anantnag with 1304, Baramulla with 1,132, and Bandipora with 903. The distribution spans mountain districts and valley towns alike, and the animals responsible, black Himalayan bears, leopards, wild boars, monkeys, appear across each.
The black bear is by far the most frequent aggressor. A study published in the International Journal of Research in Medical Sciences, examining conflict data from 2005 to 2006 in Kashmir, found that scalp and facial injuries were the most common presentation, with the black bear named as the leading cause.
A separate study by Professor Ajaz A Shah from the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Government Dental College and Hospital, Srinagar, examined 161 patients who had suffered facial injuries and 109 with head injuries from animal attacks. The bear’s instinct is to strike at the face and head. Those who survive often do so permanently altered, in appearance, in mobility, and in the quiet arithmetic of what they can no longer do.
Survival Stories
Ghulam Ahmed Sheikh was a grandfather who made a habit of taking his infant granddaughter to the playground near Kangan in Ganderbal. His son described it as a near-daily routine, one of those small rituals that structures a grandpa’s day and anchors a grandchild’s early memory.
“He loved to spend time with my little infant daughter; he never missed a chance to take her outside,” he said. One afternoon at the Check Akhal Playground, a black Himalayan bear appeared. In the attack that followed, Sheikh placed himself between the bear and the child. The child was unharmed. Sheikh was not.
“His face was totally damaged due to the bear directly attacking his face, and he had suffered a massive blood loss,” his son recalled. Sheikh was rushed to SKIMS, Kashmir’s leading medical institute, where he underwent two surgeries over 25 days. He did not survive. His granddaughter, now a few years older, has since been told about the day her grandfather died protecting her.
Mohammed Yusuf Gojar, 29, from south Kashmir, was walking to work one October morning in 2024 when a black Himalayan bear crossed his path. He was a chef, the sole earner in his family, and the morning had begun like any other. “He grabbed my leg and shoulder at first, then while I tried to defend myself he grabbed one of my hands,” Gojar remembered. What followed was a struggle lasting almost half an hour. “The grip of the bear was so strong that I was not able to free myself on my own.”
A pheran wrapped around his face may have saved his life, had the bear reached his head, the outcome would likely have been different. Nearby locals heard his screams and intervened. He was taken to a hospital and referred to SKIMS, where he was treated and discharged after several weeks.
Gojar has tried to return to cooking since the attack, but the injuries to his shoulder and hand make it impossible to sustain. “After almost four months of rest, I went back to the restaurant where I was working, but unfortunately after a few hours of work my shoulder suffered a massive pain and upon seeing this the restaurant owner asked me to go home as I was screaming at times while working.” He now works as a farmer. The income is not enough to cover his children’s education or household expenses.
Ferocious Leopards
Leopard attacks, while less frequent than those involving bears, carry a far higher fatality rate. A study, Predator Alert, carried out jointly by the Jammu and Kashmir Department of Wildlife Protection and the Wildlife Trust of India, found that 58 per cent of incidents involving leopards resulted in death, compared to 9 per cent with bears. With bears, around 53 per cent of all recorded incidents resulted in grievous injury rather than death, a distinction that, for many survivors, means years of difficult recovery rather than a quick end.
This disparity in lethality became impossible to ignore after what happened in Humhama, Budgam, when a five-year-old girl named Ada Yasir Mir disappeared from the lawns of her own house while playing. A leopard had taken her. During the subsequent search operation, conducted by the SDRF and local residents, her body parts were found.
“She was my princess. This incident has inflicted a wound that will never ever heal,” her father told mourners at her funeral. “The administration needs to be made aware and alert so that no other father loses his child in this manner.”
Last December, another child. Sumaiya Jan, daughter of Riyaz Ahmad Paswal from Khiram’s Gallan Gujarat Basti in south Kashmir, was attacked by a leopard near her home. Neighbours intervened and the leopard fled, but the injuries were too severe.
She was rushed to the primary health centre at Srigufwara, where she was declared dead on arrival. Video of her mother crying inconsolably as her daughter was taken for burial circulated widely, reigniting public anger about a crisis that the administration had not yet managed to bring under control.
Shrinking Habitats
The reasons behind what is happening are not mysterious. Forests have been shrinking, prey has grown scarce, and animals that once stayed within the limits of protected areas have begun moving outward, into farmland, orchards, and settlements, in search of food. The movement is not random. It follows the logic of hunger and diminishing habitat.
A major study titled Forest Cover Decline Masks Increasing Fragmentation and Landscape Integrity Loss in the Kashmir Himalaya, published by researchers from the University of Kashmir on SSRN, documented the scale of this transformation. Forest cover in the region declined from 4,583.58 sq kms in 1978 to 4,306.94 sq km in 2021, a net loss of 276.65 sq km, or just over six per cent. But the raw acreage tells only part of the story. The Fragmentation Index increased threefold over the same period, while the Integrity Index and Landscape Condition Index declined by 74.4 and 71.1 per cent respectively. The forests are not merely smaller; they are broken apart, disconnected, and ecologically hollowed out. A fragmented forest cannot sustain the same prey base as a connected one. When prey declines, predators and foragers move.
Intesar Suhail, Wildlife Warden for North Kashmir, identified several compounding factors. One is a shift in agricultural land use, with traditional paddy cultivation progressively giving way to cash crops, particularly apples. Orchards, it turns out, offer bears something the degraded forest increasingly cannot: reliable, high-quality food in large quantities.
“This attracts bears, which get good quality and large quantity of food in an orchard, rather than in the forest,” Suhail explained. The orchards that families depend on for their livelihoods have become, from the bear’s perspective, a preferable alternative to the diminished forest.
A second factor concerns where conflict is actually occurring. “Almost 95 per cent of human wildlife conflict incidents occur outside protected areas in territorial forest areas,” Suhail said. These are the buffer zones and territorial forests where habitat has degraded to the point that it no longer supports adequate food or prey for large animals. The protected area, with its formal boundaries and enforcement, holds. The territory beyond it does not.
Changing weather patterns have compounded the pressure. Higher-altitude areas that would historically have received snowfall by late November now often do not see it until late January or early February. That delay pushes animals to lower elevations earlier in the year and extends the period of contact with human settlements into seasons when people are more active outdoors. “Areas higher up being still snow bound due to late snowfall has added to the incidents this spring,” Suhail noted. The disruption to seasonal rhythms that communities have long relied upon to predict animal movement is now itself unpredictable.
Open and poorly managed waste disposal near settlements has added yet another pull. As the forest offers less, human habitation offers more, not just orchards and crops, but food waste that is accessible and unsecured. The combination of push and pull factors means that the pressure on the boundary between the wild and the settled is not likely to ease on its own.
Debt and Delay
For those who survive these attacks, recovery is measured not only in months of physical rehabilitation but in the financial damage that accumulates while they are unable to work. Compensation exists on paper, over the past five years, the Jammu and Kashmir government has paid out Rs 691.857 lakhs to survivors and victims’ families, a figure disclosed during the recent budget session of the Assembly. But for many, the amount arrives too late or falls too short, and the gap between the attack and the payment is filled with debt.
Ali Mohammed Sheikh was attacked by a black Himalayan bear on the November 17, 2025. He submitted all required documents to the wildlife department. The compensation has not arrived.
His nephew Aadil, who has been helping manage the process, explained that Sheikh is survived by two daughters, both still in school, and was the family’s sole earner. When the bear attacked, Sheikh was working as a daily wage labourer. The injuries made continuation impossible. Months into his recovery, he attempted to return to work. He came home that day, walked into the house, and lost consciousness. Doctors told the family not to allow him to try again.
Sheikh had taken on a debt of roughly Rs 1.5 lakh to cover treatment costs and keep the household running during his months at home. The amount has not been repaid. “He is survived by two daughters, both of whom are still studying, and my uncle was the lone earning hand in his family,” Aadil said. The compensation, if and when it arrives, is intended first to settle that debt, to repay the neighbours and friends who gave money when there was nowhere else to turn.
Mohammed Yusuf Gojar’s situation runs in parallel. Unable to work as a chef, he borrowed Rs 50,000 from a friend during the months he was bedridden. He has not been able to return the full amount. The awkwardness of that unpaid debt sits alongside the physical pain and the curtailed career. “After finishing my entire savings I took a debt from one of my friends, and he gave the amount without a single thought, but now as I have failed to pay him back, it feels very awkward and at the same time causes a lot of mental trauma,” he said.
Across Jammu and Kashmir, the pattern is consistent. A person engaged in an ordinary task, walking to work, tending an orchard, accompanying a grandchild to a playground, is attacked. The injuries take months to heal. During those months, daily wages stop. Treatment costs arrive. Loans accumulate. Savings, where they exist, are spent down to nothing. The compensation process moves at its own pace. The financial disruption compounds the physical one, and falls hardest on daily-wage workers and small farmers, the people who can least absorb it and who are most frequently in the spaces where these encounters occur.
What the official compensation figures do not capture is the interval: the weeks and months between the attack and the payment, during which families borrow from neighbours, defer school fees, and watch the total owed continue to grow. For people like Gojar and Sheikh, who are still repaying what they borrowed while still recovering from their injuries, the arithmetic does not resolve. They survived the attack. The aftermath has proven harder to survive. As Gojar put it plainly: “Life has changed and days no longer feel worth living.”
