This story is from March 10, 2022
Kulmuste
village, near Dugarwadi inTrimbakeshwar
taluka, on Tuesday evening.The boy, identified asRoshan Khadam
, was rushed to the civil hospital. He underwent surgery on Wednesday afternoon and received close to 25 stitches.Babulal Agrawal, a paediatric surgeon at the civil hospital, said the child had bled profusely after the attack in which he suffered injuries on his neck, back, stomach, hand and face. Currently, he is being given blood. His condition could be termed serious, the surgeon said.Kulmuste is a hamlet near Dugarwadi, about 30 km from Nashik city. The boy was sitting close to his grandmother, who was cooking. The leopard stealthily entered the premises and pounced on the child. His grandmother immediately raised an alarm. As the leopard was trying to drag the child away, neighbours came to help. They started shouting and chasing the leopard. The boy’s uncle,Raoji Khadam
, said the leopard must have gone about 100m from their house, but as everyone started shouting, the animal dropped the child and fled. Another relative said it had taken them more than half an hour to reach Trimbakeshwar on a bike, from where they got an ambulance to take the child to the hospital. The boy’s relatives said had the grandmother not been there, no one would have known that the child had been taken by the leopard. Roshan’s parents are workers in Pune. Their two children live with the grandmother. Rajesh Pawar, the range forest officer of Trimbakeshwar, said, “We are planning to put up a cage for the leopard. The area is surrounded by a forest and there have been a couple of such instances in the past as well, but no one has died in a leopard attack so far.”Pawar said the child was not really in the house, but in a shaded veranda on the rear of the house where people usually cook. At the time of the incident, there was no electricity. “We have told the gram panchayat to arrange for power,” said the RFO.
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