Wanted: A Pied Piper for CP

By Lalit K. Jha

NEW DELHI, OCT. 7.

The menace of rats in the prestigious Connaught Place area which has been causing business losses worth crores annually has now made the average trader sit up and press the alarm bells for the pied piper.

The ``Relief from Rats Campaign'' with be launched soon by the Indian Pest Control Association (an all-India body of commercial pest control operators) in association with the New Delhi Traders Association (an apex body of traders of this popular shopping mall) after formal approval for this is given by the New Delhi Municipal Council.

``This ever increasing rat menace needs to be tackled at the earliest. But before giving a formal approval for the campaign we want to ensure full-proof safe disposal of dead rats,'' said Lt. Col. A.S. Gurang, head of the Health Department, NDMC. ``In case adequate care is not taken, dead rats can become more deadly than the live ones,'' he added.

For the time being officials of both the NDMC and the Indian Pest Control Association are debating on the measures to be adopted for disposal of dead rats. ``We will kill the rats and we will remove them also. At the same time we want to take the help of the manpower of safai karamcharis of the NDMC,'' said Mr. H. S. Vyas, chairman of the Rodent Control Project of the Association.

Conceding that NDMC's apprehension was genuine, Mr. Vyas said the campaign would take the help of a slow rodenticide -- Roban -- resulting in nervous breakdown of the rats over a period of one week, unlike the ``zinc phosphate'' used in houses which has immediate effect.

The number of rat burrows inside the Connaught Place have witnessed a tremendous jump in the past year, particularly in the parks, backlanes and backyards of showrooms and restaurants and shops. Rodenticide would be kept in cake-form in these burrows, shops, backlanes and other identified places.

``We hope that a large number of rats would die in the borrows only, which we will later close. An intensive campaign would be launched to search each dead rat in association with the traders and the safai karamcharis. They will be buried in a big pit,'' Mr. Vyas said, adding ``the entire process is fool proof.''

It is not that Connaught Place alone is suffering from rat menace in the Capital. ``While it might be in thousands here, it is in lakhs in the market areas of the Walled City like Sadar Bazaar and Khari Baoli and also in a number of residential areas,'' he said. ``In fact they need much urgent attention. But we choose CP for its prominence''.

The campaign from the Connaught Place is just a beginning which will slowly be expanded to other parts of the city. Referring to the extent of damages resulting in huge business losses to the traders of this shopping mall, Mr. Vyas said that many times they went on to destroy the insulation of cables also. ``Losses are in crores. It could be gauged by the fact that almost every shop and showrooms have taken special precaution to protect their items from rats,'' he said.

This initiative from the Indian Pest Control Association is likely to bring major relief to Delhi-ites, as the civic bodies here do not have a definite policy to deal with the rodents unlike those in Mumbai, which has a special Rat Catching Squad.

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