By Sandeep Verma 
Siddharthnagar, May 14: A man walked into a government office to ask for help. His mother was lying at home with stitches on her head after monkeys attacked her. He had already filed a complaint. Nobody had come. So he went to the biggest officer in the district, the District Magistrate, thinking surely this time someone will listen.
The DM was watching reels.
Not glancing at his phone. Not quickly checking something. Sitting there, scrolling, while a son stood across the table and explained that his elderly mother had been mauled by monkeys and needed help. No eye contact. No response. Not even a nod to show that he had heard.
Someone in that room recorded it. And once that video got out, the rest of the country heard it too.
He Had Already Tried
This is the part that really needs to sit for a moment.
The family did not walk into the DM’s office on day one. They had already been through the proper process. A written complaint was filed with the District Forest Officer in Siddharthnagar. It had everything. What happened, when it happened, how badly the mother was hurt. Multiple stitches on her head after a monkey attack in their village.
They waited. Nobody came. No officer, no inspection, no phone call saying we have received your complaint and here is what happens next. Nothing. The complaint went in and disappeared, the way complaints do when nobody on the other side actually intends to act on them.
So the son did the only thing left. He went up the chain. He went to the District Magistrate’s office, which is the most powerful administrative office at the district level. If the DFO would not help, maybe the DM would direct him to. That is how the system is supposed to work.
He got a man watching reels.
What Is Actually Happening With Monkeys in UP
A lot of people watching this video from cities might wonder how serious a monkey attack really is. The answer, for families living in villages across Uttar Pradesh, is very serious indeed.
This is not a new problem. For years, monkeys have been attacking people in residential areas, villages, and small towns across UP. Elderly people and children get the worst of it because they cannot run or fight back easily. The animals snatch food, raid kitchens, scratch and bite, and in several documented cases across the state, have caused deaths, including cases where people fell trying to escape an attack.
Siddharthnagar is in the eastern part of UP, close to the Nepal border. It is not a wealthy district. People here do not have the option of simply staying indoors indefinitely or moving somewhere else. They live in their villages, they work their land, and they deal with whatever comes. When monkeys start attacking people regularly, it is not an inconvenience. It is a genuine threat to daily life.
The problem for authorities is that under the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, you cannot simply catch and kill monkeys. There is a legal process involving the State Forest Department that has to be followed for relocation or management of such animals. That process exists for good reason. But when it moves at the pace it typically does in rural UP, families end up waiting for months while the threat remains very real.
That is what this family was dealing with. An injured mother, a complaint that went nowhere, and a system that was taking its time while they had none.
The Thirty Seconds That Explained Everything
There is not much to describe about the video itself because what happens in it is extremely simple. A man is speaking. An officer is on his phone. The man keeps speaking. The officer keeps scrolling.
That is it. That is the whole thing.
But sometimes the simplest things carry the most weight. Because in those few seconds you are watching the entire gap between what a government office is supposed to be and what it actually is for millions of ordinary people in this country.
The DM is not a small functionary. This is the senior-most administrative authority in the entire district. The person who is supposed to coordinate between departments, push things forward when they are stuck, and make sure citizens actually get what they came for. When someone reaches the DM’s office with a genuine problem and documentation and prior complaints that went unanswered, they are not being difficult. They are using the system exactly as it was designed.
And the system was watching reels.
The video has been shared thousands of times. People are tagging the Chief Minister’s Office. Local journalists and political figures in UP have picked it up. As of writing, the Siddharthnagar district administration has not said a word publicly. No statement, no inquiry announced, nothing.
The Quiet Ones Nobody Hears
Here is something worth thinking about.
This family got heard because someone had a phone and because the video spread. That is genuinely how it works now. The louder your humiliation, the better your chances of getting a response from people who were supposed to respond to you anyway.
But what about the family in the next village whose complaint also went nowhere and whose visit to the DFO also produced nothing, except nobody recorded it? What about the old woman in some other district who was also attacked and whose son also tried and was also ignored, but it never became a reel, never got shared, never made anyone angry on the internet?
Those families exist in large numbers. They just do not trend.
This is the real problem underneath the viral video. It is not that one DM in Siddharthnagar was rude or careless, though he clearly was both. It is that the system has quietly stopped functioning as a safety net for people who do not have cameras or connections or the luck of going viral. The District Grievance Redressal System exists. Complaint portals exist. Rules and procedures exist. What is missing is the basic culture of actually taking a person’s problem seriously because it is your job to do so, not because Twitter is watching.
Plain and Simple
An elderly woman got hurt. Her son tried to get help through the right channels. He was ignored. He went to the highest local authority. He was ignored again, this time on camera.
That should not happen in any government office anywhere in this country. It does not matter if the complaint is about monkeys or roads or water or anything else. A citizen standing in front of a public servant with a genuine problem deserves, at the very minimum, to be looked at.
The DM in this video could not manage even that.
Whether anything comes of this now depends entirely on how long the video stays loud. If enough people keep sharing and enough political pressure builds, there might be a transfer, a show-cause notice, maybe a statement. That is usually how it ends. The officer moves, the file closes, and nothing about the underlying system changes.
Meanwhile the mother in Siddharthnagar is at home. She has stitches in her head. The monkeys are still outside. And her son now knows exactly how much the system thinks his family is worth.
The answer was right there on the DM’s screen. Somewhere between one reel and the next.
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- Sandeep Verma
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