On the evening of 19 April, forest officials in Karnataka’s Shivamogga district received credible intelligence about illegal hunting in a reserve forest stretch near Haratalu village in Hosanagara taluk. When they moved in, they found three men — Dakappa (55), Bhaskar (55), and Nagaraj (53) — allegedly preparing to hunt. During the raid, forest personnel recovered 45 country-made explosive devices along with a motorcycle believed to have been used by the accused. Two of the men fled. Dakappa was arrested on the spot and later produced before the court in Hosanagara. Bhaskar and Nagaraj Gowda remain absconding. A manhunt is under way.
The devices recovered are known locally as handi bombs — or, more specifically in Kannada parlance, Handi (Wild Boar) Bombs. Dakappa is described by forest officials as a habitual poacher, notorious for targeting wild boars and other herbivores, killing animals to extract meat for sale and self-consumption.
What a handi bomb is
A handi bomb is a crude improvised explosive device designed to be placed along animal trails or near water sources. The device is typically buried or concealed in vegetation, set to detonate on contact. There is nothing discriminating about it — it cannot distinguish between a wild boar, a leopard, a sambar deer, or a person. Forest officials routinely describe them as indiscriminate, and the description is accurate in every sense: a handi bomb planted in a forest path does not wait for the intended target.
The name comes from the Kannada word for wild boar — handi — reflecting the species most commonly targeted, largely because wild boar meat has a market in parts of rural Karnataka and neighbouring states. But the devices are used across species. Forest guards and tribal community members who use the same paths are at risk. In several documented cases across India, people have been killed or maimed by devices they encountered while collecting forest produce or grazing livestock.
The Tamil Nadu Forest Department made a similar seizure in 2023 — 55 country-made bombs recovered from a poacher operating in the Poomalai reserve forest area in Tiruvannamalai district. In December 2025, wildlife officials in Punjab’s Ropar district arrested a poacher using explosive-laced bait to kill sambar deer. Handi bombs and their variants are not a Karnataka-specific phenomenon. They surface wherever the combination of a market for bushmeat, a forested landscape, and inadequate patrolling creates an opportunity.
The Shivamogga context
The operation was carried out in a reserve forest stretch along the main road connecting Kotethariga to Haratalu in the Kerehalli hobli of Hosanagara taluk — a landscape that sits within the broader Western Ghats forest belt of Shivamogga district. The region is part of one of India’s most biodiverse corridors, supporting elephant, gaur, leopard, and a range of deer and small carnivore species alongside the wild boar that Dakappa’s bombs were primarily intended to target.
Forest officials have launched a manhunt to trace and arrest the absconding accused, and indicated that further investigation is underway to determine whether the accused were part of a larger poaching network operating in the region. Forty-five live devices is not an individual’s weekend supply. The scale of the haul suggests either active deployment across multiple locations, stockpiling for a longer operation, or supply to other poachers in the network — all of which point to an organised operation rather than opportunistic hunting.
The wider problem
Bushmeat poaching in India is persistently underreported. High-profile cases involve tigers, leopards, rhinos, and pangolins — species with a clear illegal trade value. The killing of wild boar, deer, and smaller mammals with crude explosives in forest fringes rarely attracts the same attention, but it is far more widespread. It degrades prey populations that apex predators depend on, introduces lethal hazards into shared landscapes, and represents a form of wildlife crime that forest departments, stretched thin across vast territories, find extremely difficult to monitor.
The Hosanagara seizure is a reminder that the threat to India’s forests is not only the spectacular or the internationally trafficked. Sometimes it is 45 clay pots packed with powder and left along a boar path in Shivamogga — waiting for whatever comes first.
Sources: The Hans India · Deccan Chronicle