When a three-month court deadline to remove the entire monkey population expired in June, a member of the enforcement committee asked for an extension, arguing that it was cruel to capture the animals during the summer because so many were pregnant then.

The monkeys that were caught were held in specially built structures at the edge of the city, while officials waited for a deal to be negotiated with neighboring states so they could be released into forest areas far from the capital. But those states refused to take the refugees, and the animals remained in captivity, enraging wildlife protection agencies, until a disused mine area on the fringe of the city was declared a sanctuary.

The lawyer charged by the High Court with ensuring the monkeys’ removal said recently that things were as bad as ever, even in some leading hospitals. “They attack patients who are being rolled inside the hospital, pull out IV tubes and scamper off to drink the fluids,” the lawyer, Meera Bhatia, told Indian journalists.

It took the death of the deputy mayor to inject new vitality into the removal drive. The mayor, Aarti Mehra, said in a telephone interview that “after the incident, the process has really speeded up.” Already, she said, 35 municipal monkey catchers have been hired, divided into five teams across the city. Over the next few months, a total of 100 will be working in 14 teams, she said. She estimated, however, that 20,000 to 25,000 monkeys still had to be caught.

Part of the difficulty lies in people’s ambivalence toward the animals, she added. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, followers of the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman, risk being fined to feed the monkeys.

“We have a serious problem because of our religious ways,” Ms. Mehra said. “People feed them liberally. But they do attack. In the past three years, there have been 2,000 cases of monkey bite in Delhi.”

In fact, a wild monkey went on a rampage in a low-income neighborhood of the capital on Monday, injuring several people, mostly children, The Associated Press reported. Such incidents are surprisingly common.