Pest control street style: Pal had to stabilise his tea stall under the Dhakuria flyover in south Kolkata and replace the soil beneath with a mixture of concrete, sand and glass shards to restrict the mobility of rats. — The Straits Times/ANN
The state assembly in Kolkata, the seat of authority in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, has been witness to many power tussles over the decades.
But on Esplanade Row, the street next to the legislative building, humans have been waging –and seemingly losing – a battle that rages on a daily basis against a wily subterranean opponent.
In the daytime, people assert their authority on the street. They honk their cars to get through a maze of parked vehicles and pedestrians in the colonial-era neighbourhood dotted with 19th century neogothic buildings.
Lawyers, officious in their cloaks, pour out of the adjacent Calcutta High Court building and saunter through narrow pavements lined with busy food stalls.
But come night, when the cacophony dies down in this office district, an army of rodents – possibly hundreds or thousands of them – emerge from their underground bunkers and stake claim over the neighbourhood.
They loosen the earth under them, making footpaths cave in. They chew on underground cables, disrupting power supply. Not only that, they even upend record-keeping, gnawing through documents in the assembly building.
Less privileged people who sleep on pavements at night are in their cross hairs too, with the pesky rats nibbling at their limbs and ears. Even patients – both dead and alive – in the city’s hospitals have not been spared in a few cases.
Food for people, not rats: Kumar at his roadside food stall on Esplanade Row in Kolkata. Protecting his supplies from ravenous rats is a big challenge. — The Straits Times/ANN
Kolkata, once the second-largest city in the British empire and which commanded authority as far as Singapore, is today struggling to get a grip on a rodent problem.
The city’s leading English daily, The Telegraph, dedicated an editorial to this crisis on Oct 8, describing how rats were “nibbling away at the city’s foundations” as if they were “an army of ravenous locusts”.
Flyovers, roads, pavements and old buildings in several parts of the city are under threat as rats burrow through the ground under them and weaken their bases.
Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim told The Indian Express that rats are a “major problem” and blamed “illegal squatters” and “roadside eateries that throw waste food on the road” for them.
Environmentalists have attributed the surge in the population of rodents to unplanned urbanisation as the Kolkata Metropolitan Area, already home to more than 14 million people, struggles to find space for new residents.
High-rise buildings and other residential units have expanded into natural habitats that once housed rats’ predators such as owls, kites and jackals.
The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has in recent years had to reinforce damaged structures and fill up holes on footpaths, roads and walls of bridges with a mix of concrete, sand and glass shards to restrict the mobility of rats.
This is something Nepal Pal had to do as well to stabilise his tea stall under the Dhakuria flyover in south Kolkata.
“My store was caving in,” said the 37-year-old, who dug up the ground beneath his stall earlier this year and replaced the soil with the mixture.
The four-lane Dhakuria flyover, built in the 1960s, is one of several structures in the city that has weakened over the years as rats burrowed large holes through the earth underneath its approach ramps.
The rats continue to pester Pal as they creep into his stall and chew through plastic jars that he uses to stock biscuits and cakes.
“I lose 30 to 40 rupees (RM1.70-RM2.26) daily,” he said, holding out three packets of cake that had been nibbled at by rats.
He is gradually replacing the plastic jars with more expensive glass ones that come with steel lids.
Back at Esplanade Row, Kundan Kumar, a roadside food stall vendor, faces a similar struggle to protect his supplies.
“They tear into our potato sacks and eat the potatoes. They eat our wheat flour... They don’t even let us sleep here at nights. They come from here, they come from there,” he said.
As he served a customer rotis (Indian flatbread) along with dal and spiced chickpea curry, a rat helped itself to some dough stuck to the exterior of his large tin drum tandoor.
Kumar has been fortunate enough not to get bitten, but Subodh Kumar Shaw, who helps out at another stall and also spends the night on the pavement, has not been as lucky.
He has been bitten twice, including on his right ear as recently as six months ago.
“If you throw a handful of rice here at night, 50 to 60 rats will gather to eat it,” the 26-year-old said, gesturing to a spot alongside the pavement that was pockmarked with a few large holes created by rodents.
Nearby, plates from the stalls with leftover food were piled on the ground – easy pickings for rats that scurried in and out of their holes.
The authorities in Kolkata have conducted awareness campaigns on waste disposal, but bringing about behavioural change among residents remains a tall order.
The rodent species that have unleashed havoc in Kolkata include the small common house mice and the greater bandicoot that can grow as big as 30cm, not including the tail.
A rodent onslaught, however, is not just Kolkata’s bane; even better managed and affluent Western cities such as New York, Paris and London have struggled with them.
While the problem is nowhere near as apocalyptic as in Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, Kolkata Deputy Mayor Atin Ghosh said the issue is “definitely a matter of concern”.
He said that the KMC had reached out to its counterpart in Mumbai for an effective solution to exterminate the rats, but failed to find any.
Poisoning them en masse can lead to unintended results such as spreading the poison to other animals that feed on rats.
“Our experts are always searching all over the world for ways to control the population of rats, but we are not getting any solution from others,” he added. — The Straits Times/ANN
