Wolf attacks in Uttar Pradesh | Terror before sundown

It was a sunny winter afternoon in Mallahan Purwa village in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich district, which shares its border with Nepal. Over an hour was left for sunset, when a four-year-old boy, Star, went to the nearby playground. Barely a few metres away, his grandmother Devmani was chatting with her neighbours. The buffaloes were in their shed and the dogs were playfully chasing each other on the road. Bikes were honking at a distance and the tractors whirring. Suddenly, a scream broke the momentum. And Star was gone.

“Bhediya use kheech ke ganne ke khet le gaya aur uske dono haath kha gaya (The wolf dragged him away to the sugarcane fields around 3-4 km away and bit off both his arms,” recalls Priyanka, Star’s mother. By the time, the villagers found him, both his arms were gone, his body soaked in blood. Priyanka says there were at least 32 bite marks on his chest. The child, profusely bleeding, was taken to the nearest hospital – 50 km away – from where the doctors referred him to Lucknow. He died before reaching the State capital 130 km away.

Star, who breathed his last on November 28, is among the 11 who were killed allegedly by wolves in Bahraich since September 9. The victims include nine children, between two months and four years, and an elderly couple, both over 75 years. Over 30 people have been injured.

Her son’s last words echo in Priyanka’s ears whenever she lifts a glass to drink water. All he had asked for was water before closing his eyes out of pain, she says.

“We had named him Star because he really was one,” says Deepak Kumar, the child’s uncle who works as a JCB driver along with Star’s father in Karnataka. “Even at his age, he knew everyone and everything – PM, CM, phone numbers, addresses… You just needed to ask him and he would answer within seconds. We never thought that our brightest star will have such a tragic end,” the uncle adds.

Kumar, who had come home to attend his nephew’s cremation, has now decided to stay back in the village as he is afraid of leaving his two children (one is three years old, the other 15 months) alone until the killer wolves are trapped. However, Star’s father went back to work, because he can’t afford to quit his job.

Fear grips the villages

Even before the residents of Mallahan Purwa came to terms with Star’s death, another child was allegedly picked up by a wolf and killed on December 7. This time it was two-month-old Subhash. While Star was attacked in daylight, Subhash was taken away at night from his home.

“I was sleeping on the veranda and Subhash was inside the only pucca room with his mother,” recalls Mangla, the baby’s grandmother. “The room didn’t have a door,” she explains, adding, “I felt some movement and before I could jump out of bed, I saw a wolf taking away the baby in its mouth. I yelled for help and ran towards it but by then, it had vanished into the dark.” After a frantic search through the night, all they found in the morning was a bit of the child’s skull and his green pants.

Kiran, Subhash’s mother, wanted to perform the last rites of her child with the only part of the body they had, but the police is currently conducting a post-mortem on it. She has sent her four-year-old daughter away to live with her maternal grandparents, out of fear of the wolves.

The family barely manages two meals a day. Six among the nine members either sleep in the open or in huts. These are now guarded by eight policemen, deployed to ensure their safety. The police team is also creating awareness among villagers about staying safe. “We are asking everyone to keep children indoors, and if they do step out, to always have an adult with them,” says Subhash Singh, one of the constables of the patrolling team.

In the fields though, where a police van is parked, children play alone. Their parents, daily wage labourers, are unable to keep an eye on them at all times.

Operation Bhediya 2.0

This is not the first time that Bahraich has faced wolf attacks. Last year, between March and October, animal attacks had claimed the lives of seven children and left 18 people injured in Mahasi area, some 40 km from Mallahan Purwa. This had forced the Forest Department to launch Operation Bhediya (wolf in Hindi) towards the latter half of 2024. A pack of six wolves were identified by experts as the attackers.

In a mission that lasted several weeks, forest officials placed camera traps with soft toys soaked in children’s urine to create a false sense of human presence. They also left goats as prey in sugarcane fields. Five of the six wolves were caught and sent to a zoo.

This year, after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath declared that animals identified to have attacked or killed children should not be spared, shoot at sight orders were passed in case authorities failed to catch them.

This year, six wolves have been killed so far, says R.S. Yadav, District Forest Officer (DFO), who, with his team, is combing the banks of the Ghaghra river, near Bhirgu Purwa village, 10 km from Mallahan Purwa. Here, the wolves had killed 80-year-old Cheddan and his wife Manakia, 75, when the couple was sleeping on the porch of their home on September 29.

“We can sense a behavioural change in the wolves who have become smarter, fearless, and more cautious. They are not getting caught in camera traps any longer nor are they visible through drone surveillance,” says Yadav. “The earlier attacks happened at night; now, they can take place at any time,” he adds. He points towards a pugmark, saying it was a wolf’s. The forest rangers, drone handlers, and villagers rush to the spot to catch the glimpse.

Anushka, 5, survived an alleged wolf attack after her mother attacked the animal with a stick when it sneaked onto the veranda where they were sleeping. 
| Photo Credit:
Sandeep Saxena

Wolves are an endangered species and categorised as a Schedule-I animal under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Apart from U.P., wolves are majorly found in States like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, with a small population in Odisha and Madhya Pradesh as well. “We have just around 3,000 wolves in India. Bahraich is a great habitat for this animal because the district is situated on the Ghaghara river floodplains and surrounded by dense grasslands, which provides water and natural prey,” says Semmaran Muthuramalingam, conservator of the Devipatan forest circle.

He says environmental factors like floods and course changes in rivers besides man-made factors have drastically changed the landscape. This has led to a shortage of prey for wolves. “Now the wolves turn towards the villages for their prey. The tall sugarcane fields, situated barely a few kilometres from the river, are now hiding spots for wolves.”

“We are using the latest techniques to trap the alleged killer wolves but the difference in their behaviour is making it difficult for us,” said a Forest Department officer who is a part of combing team.

The officer adds that the Forest Department has written a letter to the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, requesting the institution to conduct a “seeing survey” and “habitat study” of the area so that the human-animal conflict can be minimised.

According to reports, prior to 2025 and 2024, wolves attacks made headlines in U.P. in 2002, 1996-97 and even in the late 1980s.

In 1997, after a spate of wolf attacks the previous year, Yadvendradev Jhala and Dinesh Kumar Sharma, wildlife scientists and conservationists from the WII, had published a study titled ‘Child lifting by wolves in India’. It detailed that 75 children were attacked by wolves in 50 villages in eastern U.P. between March 17 and October 15, 1996. The study found that the frequency of attacks was one every third day while a child was killed every fifth day. The average distance between consecutive attack sites was 13.28 km and the total area where attacks occurred covered 1,390 sq. km. The victims were between four months and nine years.

R.S Yadav, DFO along with team during combing operation on the river bed of Ghaghara river near the villages effected with wolf terror in Bahraich district So far three wolfs killed and one injured here during the operation equipped with drones, sharp shooter and other gadgets. 
| Photo Credit:
Sandeep Saxena

Salvador Lyngdoh, a scientist from WII, says Bahraich and nearby regions not just have wolves but other animals like leopards, hyenas, jackals and feral dogs. “I haven’t been at the spot but after studying the behaviour of wolves for years, I can say the animal in question is shy and cautious and quite afraid of humans. If it is wolves that are attacking humans, there has to be a reason for it and the same must be investigated to rule out other species,” he says.

Studies done in past also found that many areas where wolf attacks took place had more vulnerable children than domestic livestock or wild prey. Most killings were related to some form of neglect by the parents and most of the victims belonged to the poor section of society. Over 50% of them had only their mother to look after them, says Satish Kumar, chairperson and professor of the Department of Wildlife Science, Aligarh Muslim University.

Satish feels that even if the attacking animal is a wolf, it is likely to be a lone wolf and not a pack. “This was one of the observations that I recorded during my past visits to places where reports of wolf attacks came from U.P., both in 1996 and in 2002. Had it been a pack of wolves, the bodies would not have been found in one piece. Also, for a pack, the attacks would have been very frequent, as each animal would get only a limited amount of meat,” he says.

There are also those who doubt if the animals attacking the village residents are wolves at all. A Forest Department officer says the poverty in this region is so acute that people may claim these are wolves but they could, in fact, be any other animal. The Uttar Pradesh government has announced ₹5 lakh for every death by wolf attack while the injured get ₹50,000.

Homes without doors

Nankau, a forest watcher in Mallahan Purwa, is doing double duty these days. He is helped by the villagers who burn crackers at night to keep wolves away. As most homes lack toilets, women are advised not to venture out to relieve themselves in the dark. 

“Peeche lambanbaa;muhbaranbaa (Their back is long and face big),” details Baadi Devi, who claims to have seen the wolves many times. The last time she saw one was early one morning when it attacked Anushka, 5, on the veranda of her home, where the family was sleeping. She narrowly escaped death after her mother attacked the animal with a stick. The child still has scratches on her back and a wound on the chest.

Kiran does not wish to get into the nitty-gritty of what killed her two-month-old son. All she knows is that children are getting killed and that needs to be to stopped. “Save our children from whatever is killing them,” she says.

Edited by Sunalini Mathew