Sloth bear Rani and the Teddy bear man!

Originally published November 2009. Refreshed and fact-checked August 2026 against the original 2008 reporting.

The Indian forests have changed a lot since the days of Mowgli, and the irony of this story is hard to shake. It reads like a real-life Jungle Book. Except this one happened in a village in Odisha in 2008, it made international wire news, and nobody involved got the ending they wanted.

Sloth bear Rani

Ram Singh Munda, 35, a member of an indigenous tribe from Rutisila village under Ghatagaon block in Odisha’s Keonjhar district, 225 km north of state capital Bhubaneswar, found an abandoned sloth bear cub in the forest when she was about three days old. Left alone, she’d have died within a day or two. He carried her home, bottle-fed her, and the family named her Rani, which means Queen.

Munda was a widower raising his five-year-old daughter, Dulki, alone. Rani became the sibling Dulki didn’t have. The family shared their meals with her, Munda took her for rides on the back of his bicycle, and for close to eighteen months, nobody outside the village knew a sloth bear was living as part of a human family. No one used her for money. No one hurt her.

The chase, the jail, and the law that gave officials no room to bend

Word reached Odisha’s forest department in early June 2008: a tribal man in Ghatagaon was raising a sloth bear at home. Officials tracked Munda for over a week before they moved. When they finally closed in, Rani bolted into the forest. She was recaptured and taken to Nandankanan Zoological Park, and Munda was arrested around 16–17 June and jailed in Keonjhar, charged under Sections 9, 39(3), 40, and 42 of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, which govern hunting and possessing protected wildlife without the Chief Wildlife Warden’s written permission. Dulki, now motherless and fatherless for the duration of his custody, was sent to a state-run boarding school.

Legal commentators in Odisha argued at the time that the charges didn’t fit the facts: Munda had rescued a dying cub, not hunted or acquired a wild animal, and the Act’s own definitions left room for that distinction. It’s a fair argument, and it went nowhere. Reports at the time put his potential sentence at three to seven years plus a fine of up to ₹25,000 if convicted, though accounts of the exact ceiling varied. As of that July, the charges were still under investigation, with no fast resolution in sight.

Not everyone in the public conversation was on Munda’s side, either. Animal rights groups who mobilized behind him, including People for Animals Orissa and OIPA India, called the arrest heavy-handed cruelty toward a man who’d only ever shown the bear kindness. But Union Minister Maneka Gandhi, one of India’s most prominent animal-welfare voices, pushed back publicly at the time: the law required Munda to hand an orphaned protected species to police or forest officials, not raise her at home, whatever his reasons for keeping her.

Context that the story rarely gets told with: 2008–09 was also the tail end of India’s centuries-old “dancing bear” trade, where the Kalandar community kept sloth bears in captivity and forced them to perform on the street, using exactly the same claim Munda could make, that the bear was cared for, not exploited. Wildlife SOS surrendered India’s last known dancing bear that December, after rescuing 628 sloth bears from that trade. Forest officials in 2008 had almost no discretion to distinguish a genuine rescue from a cover story, because the cover story was the entire premise the dancing-bear trade ran on for decades. That doesn’t make what happened to Munda’s family fair. It explains why nobody in the system was willing to bend. It’s the same tension that runs through Shaktiman’s story eight years later: an animal caught between real affection and a system with almost no room for judgment calls.

What actually happened to Ram Singh Munda and Rani

Munda was released on bail on 23 June 2008. Four days later, he and Dulki made the 225 km trip to Nandankanan to see Rani for the first time since the arrest. Rani had reportedly refused food since arriving. When Munda reached her enclosure, she recognized him immediately, and staff let him inside for a 30-minute reunion. When it ended, Rani tried to follow him out and had to be held back. Munda volunteered on the spot to work at the zoo as her caretaker. The deputy director turned him down, citing legal restrictions on hiring him.

That’s where the public record runs out. A campaign blog that covered the case daily through June 2008 goes silent after the 26th, and no source, in 2008 or since, reports how Munda’s case was finally resolved or what became of Rani at Nandankanan. If you know more, and you grew up in Keonjhar, worked at the zoo, or followed the case through to a verdict, this comments section has stayed open on this story since 2009. Add what you know.

What makes sloth bears different from every other bear in India

Melursus ursinus is the only bear species found across most of the Indian subcontinent, and it’s built differently from the bears people picture. Sloth bears eat mostly termites, ants, and fruit, and they hunt insects by clamping onto a mound and vacuuming it out through a gap where their front teeth should be, a slurp you can hear from meters away. Poor eyesight makes them more likely than most bears to be startled at close range, which is part of why they have an outsized reputation for aggression toward people who stumble into one by accident, despite eating almost nothing that isn’t an insect.

India is home to an estimated 20,000 sloth bears, spread across roughly 174 protected areas in 19 states, Odisha among them. The IUCN lists the species as Vulnerable, with habitat loss, poaching, and human conflict as the main pressures. That population estimate is from a 2005 survey. There’s been no reliable full recount since, which tells you something about how much attention the species gets compared to India’s tigers and elephants. India’s wildlife and cruelty laws are stricter on paper than most people realize; we’ve broken down what they actually say in our guide to animal laws in India.

Dog with Blog exists because we believe India’s own animals, indie dogs, street-born, overlooked, deserve the same care as any imported breed. Rani’s story is a reminder that the instinct to take in something small and abandoned is the right one. Knowing when that animal needs a forest instead of a family is the harder part. If you want to see how that instinct plays out for India’s dogs specifically, our adoption directory is where it goes next.