If you’re ever in New Delhi and suppose you hear a monkey, don’t assume it’s a monkey. It could possibly be knowledgeable monkey noise impersonator.

That’s as a result of people have been educated to mimic the guttural grunts and shrieks of gray langurs, a sort of enormous monkey that may scare away the smaller varieties that are inclined to invade metropolis officers’ residences or disrupt state visits.

This weekend, the impersonators will tackle a contemporary problem: conserving monkeys, which frequently evade guards by swinging via tree canopies, from barging into venues for the Group of 20 summit of world leaders, the primary to happen in India.

The occasion is an important one for India on the global stage, and the federal government doesn’t need monkeys to steal the highlight.

“We are trying everything to keep the monkeys away,” Satish Upadhyay, vice chairman of the New Delhi Municipal Council, mentioned in an interview. The marketing campaign contains coaching 40 folks to mimic langur noises and putting life-size cutouts of the animals, which may weigh greater than 30 kilos, across the venues.

Every place has its distinctive challenges in internet hosting a big and prestigious occasion. Gatherings just like the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto and the 1999 World Trade Organization assembly in Seattle had been disrupted by protests. Before their turns internet hosting the Olympics, Beijing, Paris and Salt Lake City tried to cover poor and homeless residents.

New Delhi, too, faces issues together with air pollution and its repute as a metropolis that’s unsafe for women. Amid India’s G20 promotional blitz, advocates say the city’s poor have been hidden away.

And then there are the wild monkeys, primarily rhesus macaques.

They will not be shy. They steal food and chase pedestrians. They generally journey buses and subway trains. They have attacked sufferers inside hospitals, invaded the Defense Ministry and the prime minister’s workplace and romped within the Indian Parliament building.

Such antics often have lethal penalties. In an excessive case, a deputy mayor died in 2007 after falling from his balcony whereas making an attempt to scare away monkeys by utilizing a stick.

“The monkeys are naughty and they can arrive at your dinner table, in any house in Delhi,” mentioned Abdul Khan, a contract monkey noise imitator in New Delhi, whose uncle as soon as used reside monkeys to shoo smaller ones. “It doesn’t matter how many security guards you have outside the gate.”

Numerous Indian and abroad information retailers kicked off their protection of the G20 final week with studies on the federal government’s plans for scaring off the macaques. Manisha Pande, the managing editor at Newslaundry, an Indian media watchdog, mentioned such protection was “as clichéd as it gets” and that many Indians had been “quite bored of the foreign press regurgitating the same monkey story.”

She mentioned she couldn’t recall any occasion or summit within the nation ever being disrupted by monkeys.

“That said, monkeys are known to be a bit of an urban menace when it comes to Delhi and many other cities of South Asia and Southeast Asia, just like sea gulls are a menace in any coastal European city,” she mentioned.

Deploying monkey noise impersonators throughout state visits and different necessary features is a comparatively new tactic in Delhi, and it’s a far much less aggressive one than these metropolis authorities used up to now: human monkey chasers and precise grey langurs, to not point out slingshots, stones and tranquilizer weapons.

In 2012, the nationwide authorities banned using precise langurs, after activists mentioned the observe amounted to animal cruelty. Most of these langurs had been captured from the wild in violation of Indian legal guidelines, mentioned Valentina Sclafani, a psychologist on the University of Lincoln in Britain who has studied primate conduct.

Another problem is that in Hinduism, India’s dominant faith, monkeys are considered as representations of a deity, and a few folks wish to feed them as a conventional providing.

So Delhi officers started in search of different choices. Langur voice mimickers, as an example, had been half of a bigger effort to tidy up Delhi’s tough edges forward of President Obama’s 2015 state visit.

Does such mimicry truly work, although?

Emily Bethell, an skilled on primate conduct and social cognition at Liverpool John Moores University in Britain, mentioned that she had discovered no peer-reviewed research on langur voice mimicry being an efficient technique for holding a macaque inhabitants.

Still, she mentioned, the observe seems to be based mostly on a sound understanding of macaque conduct.

“Whether they can mimic those calls so closely that a macaque would interpret them as coming from a langur we cannot know without rigorous scientific testing,” Dr. Bethell mentioned in an e-mail. “However, the macaques may be familiar with humans making these calls and associate them with threat, which could be enough.”

Dr. Sclafani additionally expressed cautious optimism concerning the observe, saying there’s some proof that macaques can acknowledge and reply to langurs’ alarm and territorial calls below sure situations.

A hypothetical monkey disruption on the G20 may threaten the federal government’s “meticulously built” repute for occasion administration and provides the political opposition fodder to assault Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing get together forward of upcoming state-level elections, mentioned Sanjeev M.A., a professor of promoting on the Jaipuria Institute of Management in Lucknow, India, who has studied disaster communication by Indian officers through the coronavirus pandemic.

If any monkeys had been to be killed, he added, that might upset members of India’s Hindu majority and permit the opposition to query the federal government’s spiritual sensitivities.

Mr. Upadhyay, the municipal official, declined a reporter’s request to interview among the impersonators. He mentioned their work was a part of persevering with analysis by forestry officers to seek out new methods of scaring off monkeys.

He expressed confidence within the impersonators’ probabilities of success on the G20.

“Will it be 100 percent effective?” he said. “It doesn’t work that way.”