- A seed goat bank initiative has been started in Simni, a village in the Purulia district of West Bengal, wherein goats killed by a wild carnivore are replaced by another goat from the bank.
- A similar project was undertaken in 2017 in Sarada, a village in the Howrah district where goats were being killed by fishing cats. But it was discontinued after two years.
- The initiative in Purulia however, has voluntary goat-keepers and a village-level goat bank management committee that manages compensation claims after verification.
During his vacations, Bimal Mahato, a 23-year-old student, takes care of the 15 goats that his family owns. He takes the herd for grazing to a forest near his village Haratan, in West Bengal’s Purulia district.
In July 2025, while preparing to return after one such outing, Mahato counted his goats and found one missing.
“In this forest adjacent to our village, on the other side of which lies Jharkhand, there are quite a few carnivores. I saw flashes of something dragging my goat away but couldn’t recognise the animal properly,” Mahato describes. “There isn’t much wolf presence in this forest, and it would be difficult for a small animal like a jackal to drag a goat so quickly,” he added.
Mahato predicted that it could’ve been a bigger animal, like a leopard, which took the goat away. He also noted that a leopard was spotted quite a few times last year, so there may be some correlation.
In the same month, Mahato received Purulia’s first ‘replacement goat’ as compensation, provided through a Seed Goat Bank. The project, launched in 2024 in the district’s Simni area is an initiative of the West Bengal-based environmental NGO, Human and Environment Alliance League (HEAL).
The community-operated Seed Goat Bank was started with a WWF India-funded pilot project in Purulia for carnivore conservation through a community-based approach, Vasudha Mishra, a researcher at HEAL told Mongabay-India.
Livestock depredation often leads to retaliatory killings of wild animals. This situation intensifies when the predator’s habitat is surrounded by human-dominated areas and unprotected forests. “Purulia, despite having diverse wildlife, lacks designated protected areas. It has predators such as leopards, wolves, hyenas and jackals which prey on livestock. This has led to retaliatory killings in the past. One of our main goals with this project is to stop the retaliatory killings,” Mishra elaborates.
How the goat bank works
Agriculture and goat rearing are the primary occupations in Purulia’s Simni area, where the Seed Goat Bank is established.
“Most families have 10-12 goats. One goat costs around ₹15,000-20,000 and people rear them for meat. We sell them to mutton shops as well as to caterers or for big events,” Mahato says about the villages in Purulia.
“We grow rice and vegetables here, but farming is difficult because of the terrain and water scarcity. So, we depend heavily on goat rearing for our livelihood,” he adds. Purulia located on the Chotanagpur plateau has a semi-arid and harsh landscape with the soil having low water retention capacity.
The goat bank is managed by a village-level Goat Bank Management Committee that oversees operations and compensations. So far, in over a year or so of operations, the bank has replaced three goats that were lost to predators.
“The committee chose voluntary goat-keepers who were provided with 10 female goats to care for and breed, with the condition that one kid from the litter will replace village residents’ livestock. When a compensation claim comes, we verify if the goat has been actually killed by a wild carnivore. Once we verify the claim, we replace the goat from one of the goats in the bank,” Manikchand Mandal, a resident of Simni and a goat bank committee member, tells Mongabay-India. To verify the claim, the committee checks the carcass of the goat to make sure it has been killed by a wild animal. Claims are not accepted if the beneficiary has used the remains of the carcass, adds Mandal.
Mishra says this system worked because it was similar to the system of bhagi which is prevalent in the area and people were already familiar with. Under this system, if someone has goats but doesn’t have time or expertise to care for it, they give it to another person skilled at goat rearing. “The second person rears the goat on the condition that they will get the first kid from the litter,” she explains.
Why an earlier goat bank could not survive
In 2017, a similar goat bank project was started in another West Bengal village. Sarada, a village in the Howrah district, is surrounded by wetlands, a prime habitat of the fishing cat. But as these wetlands shrink and natural prey declines, the fishing cat increasingly targets fish in bheris, goats and poultry, says Howrah-based environmentalist Chitrak Pramanik. This led to retaliatory killings by people who lost their livestock to the fishing cat.
To counter this retaliation and save the cat, Sarada Prasad Teertha Jan Kalyankari Samiti, a local NGO started a seed goat bank. However, the project could not sustain itself beyond a couple of years because as it scaled, verifying the claims became difficult.
Joydeb Pradhan, the head of the organisation tells Mongabay-India, “When the NGO members were going around the village showing pictures of the animal to raise awareness, villagers were of the view that “this is the animal which takes away our goats, why should we save it?” The organisation then came up with the idea of a seed goat bank to end the negative interactions between humans and fishing cats.
Under the project, local communities in Sarada were given pregnant goats with a condition that one female kid from the second litter will be given to the bank which will, in turn, be used as compensation for goats being lost to fishing cats.
Talking about the project in Sarada he says, “For two years, the project was very smooth. People in our village had trust and reported actual incidents without any greed. However, as the programme gained more popularity and was implemented to a larger area with more villages brought in, the actual verification became difficult. People from other villages would report false cases, and if the compensation was denied, people would hold grudges and badmouth the project.”
Wildlife biologist and an expert on fishing cats, Tiasa Adhya, who was also the technical advisor of the Sarada project, also blamed politics. She says, “When people were denied goats because of misreporting and not providing conclusive evidence, this is where politics got involved. The hearsay of misappropriation of funds and claims being denied for being from another village started doing rounds. This is when the anger towards the programme and the species started growing and we thought it better to close it.”
“The number of claims were way higher than average cases of attacks. Everyone was reporting the attack, but our fact-finding teams couldn’t get any evidence on the ground. This is when other factions of different political parties also started getting involved muddling the whole programme,” she adds. According to Adhya, this was the first goat bank project in India.
Mishra also notes that the project in Purulia worked because their committee was completely volunteers-based with no leaders. “There were two points of contact for the village residents. Also to maintain transparency, we made a document about the programme in both English and Bengali and got it signed by all the stakeholders from HEAL and the local committee.”
Read more: Heavy metals, microplastics found in fishing cats
Banner image: Bimal Mahato carries a goat from the Seed Goat Bank in Purulia, where volunteers breed goats to replace livestock lost to carnivores. Image by HEAL.
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