Image caption The condition of the little girl, who reportedly struggles to communicate, is said to be improving 
 
 Police in northern India are searching lists of missing children to try to identify a girl believed to have been living with monkeys. 
 
 The little girl, aged between eight and 10, was found a few weeks ago in a forest in Uttar Pradesh. 
 
 Doctors said she could not communicate and displayed "monkey-like" traits. 
 
 A senior police official told BBC Hindi she had been playing with a pack of monkeys and imitating their behaviour when police went to rescue her. 
 
 The little girl was spotted by villagers in the Katarniaghat wildlife sanctuary, on the Indian border with Nepal. 
 
 The police official, Suresh Yadav, said the monkeys attacked his squad when they arrived to take her away. 
 
 Doctors said she was malnourished when she was brought in, with long hair and nails, and wounds on her body. 
 
 She was also unable to communicate but would screech and initially walked on all fours. 
 
 Her condition is said to be much better now, however, and in the long term she is expected to be handed over to child welfare agencies and other medical specialists to slowly reintroduce her to the world. 
 
 The hospital's chief medical officer, DK Singh, told BBC Hindi that although she was still in hospital, she would be transferred to the Lucknow Medical College once she had been given a clean bill of health so that she could get better medical care. 
 
 Local District Magistrate Ajaydeep Singh has also visited the girl in hospital and has named her "Forest Durga", a reference to a Hindu warrior goddess. 
 
 Many in India are comparing the little girl to Mowgli, the character from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book who was raised by wolves. It is not clear, however, how long the little girl has been living in the forest. ||||| A young Indian girl sits on a bed in a hospital in this image taken from video in Bahraich northern India Thursday April 6, 2017. Indian police are reviewing reports of missing children from recent years... (Associated Press) 
 
 A young Indian girl sits on a bed in a hospital in this image taken from video in Bahraich northern India Thursday April 6, 2017. Indian police are reviewing reports of missing children from recent years to try to identify the girl who was found in a forest with a group of monkeys. The girl, believed... (Associated Press) 
 
 LUCKNOW, India (AP) — Indian police are reviewing reports of missing children to try to identify a girl who was found living in a forest with a group of monkeys. 
 
 The girl, believed to be 10 to 12 years old, was unable to speak, was wearing no clothes and was emaciated when she discovered in January and taken to a hospital in Bahraich, a town in Uttar Pradesh state in northern India. 
 
 She behaved like an animal, running on her arms and legs and eating food off the floor with her mouth, said D.K. Singh, chief medical superintendent of the government-run hospital. 
 
 After treatment, she has begun walking normally and eating with her hands. 
 
 "She is still not able to speak, but understands whatever you tell her and even smiles," Singh said. 
 
 Some woodcutters spotted the girl roaming with monkeys, police officer Dinesh Tripathi told The Associated Press on Thursday. They alerted police. 
 
 "They said the girl was naked and was very comfortable in the company of monkeys. When they tried to rescue the girl, they were chased away by the monkeys," the officer said. 
 
 She was rescued later by a police officer in the Katarniya Ghat forest range. "When he called the girl, the monkeys attacked him but he was able to rescue the girl. He sped away with her in his police car while the monkeys gave chase," Tripathi said. 
 
 He said police are trying to determine how the girl got into the forest and who her parents are. 
 
 She will be sent to a home for juveniles until she is identified, Singh said. ||||| Contrary to initial claims girl’s rapid improvement indicates she was recently abandoned by her carers 
 
 The discovery of a girl reportedly living with monkeys in the forests of northern India has been compared to a modern-day Jungle Book but officials and doctors close to the child say the true story is darker. 
 
 This week news reports from the state of Uttar Pradesh said the girl, aged around eight, had been found by forest rangers in January living with monkeys. She was reportedly naked, crawled on all fours and screeched at passersby. 
 
 According to more extraordinary accounts police had been forced to fight off monkeys to rescue the girl. 
 
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 But far from being raised by animals in the Katarniya Ghat forest range, the girl, who doctors believe has mental and physical disabilities, was likely to have been recently abandoned in the wilderness by her carers, the district chief forestry officer said. 
 
 JP Singh said the girl was actually found on a roadside near the forest, not deep in the wilderness. And though there were monkeys in her vicinity, his rangers “never found this girl living with monkeys”, he said. 
 
 “I think the family members of this girl had been aware that she is not able to speak, and they may have abandoned her near the forest road,” he said. “If she was living with monkeys it would have been for a few days only, not for a long time. 
 
 “It is clear from first time view, if you see the girl, that she is only eight or nine years old, but her facial expressions show that she is disabled, not only mentally but also physically,” he said. 
 
 The forest is closely monitored by rangers and CCTV, and it was unlikely she could have survived in the wilderness for long without being spotted, he added. 
 
 The chief medical officer of the hospital in Bahraich, where the girl has been receiving treatment since she was found in January, said it was difficult to “say exactly when she was abandoned”. 
 
 “In India, people do not prefer a female child and she is mentally not sound,” DK Singh said. “So all the more [evidence] she was left there.” 
 
 Ankur Lal, the chief medical officer for Bahraich district, said the nature of the child’s disability was “still under investigation”, but it was unlikely she had been raised in the forest. 
 
 “When she was found, she was behaving violently. She had no toilet habits, no communication. So it was taken that she had been living in the jungle for long,” he said. 
 
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 But the rapid improvement she had made since being hospitalised now led doctors to believe she had in fact been raised by people. “Initially she was crawling but now she is walking normally – so she hasn’t been in the jungle since birth,” Lal said. 
 
 “The truth of the matter is her family didn’t want to look after her,” said Ranjana Kumari a leading activist in the movement to promote the welfare of young girls in a society where female foeticide persists, and has severely distorted birth rates, especially in rural areas. 
 
 “Some families value girls less than boys,” she said. “They would rather get rid of the girl than spend money on her. It is a lot more responsibility because of the social environment we live in.” 
 
 She said the Indian state offered little help for poor families with disabled children – “and when it is a girl, it becomes double the issue”. 
 
 
 
 The girl will be moved on Saturday to a children’s home in Lucknow to continue her recovery.
– Unbelievable as it may sound, authorities in northern India say they've rescued a young girl who appears to have been living with monkeys. Villagers first spotted the naked child looking "very comfortable in the company of monkeys" in January in the Katarniya Ghat forest range, a police officer tells the AP. They tried to approach but the monkeys chased them away, reports the Deccan Chronicle. Police were later able to seize the girl, though monkeys also chased an officer as he "sped away with her in his police car," the officer says. The "highly aggressive" girl was then taken to a hospital in Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, where doctors say she initially walked on all fours, ate off the floor with her mouth, and ran from humans, per the Telegraph. She's described as being wound-covered, with long hair and nails. She is now walking upright, eating with her hands, and responding to humans, authorities say. She doesn't appear to speak any language (the Telegraph says she makes only "unintelligible muttering[s]"), but is warming up to her doctors and nurses—a possible sign that she retains memories of living with humans, a doctor says. A psychological assessment also indicates she likely had human contact before her time with monkeys, according to doctors. Though media outlets are calling the child Mowgli in a nod to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, doctors have given her the name of Durga, after the Hindu warrior goddess. Doctors believe she is 8 to 12 years old. Officials say they're reviewing missing child cases in the hope of identifying the girl, per the BBC. (Kipling admitted something about his book in this 1895 letter.)