Tehatta (Nadia), West Bengal: Hriday Kumar Haldar is becoming as restless as the 70-odd birds he has collected in wicker baskets. The peasant, who lives in Srirampur village of Tehatta-1 block in Nadia district, has been sitting around for one- and-a-half hours, waiting for a government culling team to arrive.
“They went around with microphones yesterday announcing that we should collect them so that they don’t have to run around after them,” he said. “But I’ve been waiting since morning and still there’s no sign of them.”
Scores of peasants such as Haldar are in the same predicament. Even as they offer up their only means of livelihood for slaughter following a district-wide move to cull birds to prevent the spread of the dreaded bird flu, the help at hand is almost always never at hand.
Price to pay: Officials in Srirampur village of Tehatta-I block in Nandia district, West Bengal, distributing compensation for culled birds. (Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/ Mint)
Villagers in nearby Balarampur and Kanainagar had started losing their birds to a mysterious illness almost a week ago, but even on Tuesday morning, the culling efforts of the Rapid Response Teams, as they have been called by the government, have been anything but rapid. This, despite poultry samples from another block in the district, Haringhata, testing positive for bird flu on Tuesday at the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory in Bhopal.
Hundreds of birds are being sent every week to the laboratory to test for what the World Health Organization (WHO) says is the worst outbreak of bird flu in India.
“It has been decided to build several new laboratories especially in view of the bird flu situation now,” Santanu Kumar Bandyopadhyay, West Bengal’s animal husbandry commissioner, said on Tuesday.
Even as the laboratory clears the backlog, veterinary workers at potentially infected areas wait for the signal to begin culling poultry, often running the risk of the virus spreading.
It now emerges that the culling, where it has already happened, has not been as complete as it should have been.
“Some people in white suits did come yesterday, but left after killing a few as they could not catch the rest,” said Mahboob Ali Mondol of Balarampur village. “Of all the chickens in our village, barely 25% have been killed,” he said. Mondol couldn’t be too far off the mark as in almost all the villages in the block, desi (indigenous) chicken roam around unconcerned.
However, the block development officer of Tehatta-1, when contacted, insisted that culling was on in full swing and the situation was under control.
It is the backyard poultries maintained by small farmers which are said to be the driving force behind the current outbreak of avian influenza in eight districts of Bengal, according to a state animal resources department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“These hens and ducks mix with migratory birds and go swimming in rivers and ponds, thereby helping propagate the virus,” he said.