The Mousetrapped Kolkata! (Image:pixabay.com)
Will the rodent populace in the Kolkata metropolis swallow the entire premises one day? Resulting a rat-eaten Kolkata!
There is something to be taken with utmost care, as recent report by the Telegraph shows that rats “run riot under the city’’.
According to the Ecologists studies, the rats are powerful underground forces which are eating away the foundations of Kolkata city from flyovers and sewerage to cable lines. More food and more waste, as the population of the city increases, cause the swelling size of mammals. Food waste that the city dumps on its streetlines are a lifeline for the rats.
Inefficient waste management systems of the municipal corporation is resulting piles of food waste stored casually on the streetsides. These piles are enough to fatten the rats to a cat size and they are changing their modus operandi from crawling the mere rice sacks to the city footings.
The rudiments of century old edifices and proud structures are now in the hands of these creeps who subsides the pavements and roads, making holes into brick walls, looting bridge bases, and damaging utility cables. They are not the least concerned of what they are doing and the functionaries are relaxing from circumventing the mice heist.
As Ecologists says, some rats of the Kolkata city are bigger than cats and vary between 60 mm and 700 mm from head to tail in size.
Weakened walls and dilapidated houses are the most favourites and it is a serious disquiet on the standing of a conurbation which is culturally significant, industrially advanced and massively human dependent.
The bricks and walls the rats choose to pierce then automatically reduces strength and compactness. Modern houses which are cement and concrete made are the least affected in such scenarios.
The Telegraph quoted an official in the CESC (Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation) who explains that the rats causes repeated “disruptions in the distribution boxes which receives power from transformers and connect to homes”. According to him, each distribution box caters half-a-dozen small rodent neighbourhoods. They bite through the road surface and manages to enter the boxes below. A rat can come in contact with an active cable and causes either short circuit or gather plastic and soil inside the box. The plastic thus accumulated is enough to trigger a flash on the wire.
The Kolkata Municipal Corporation had witnessed pavements undulating several times. This happens when the rats drill holes in the soil under the pavement blocks. The civic body pumped water into a tunnel a year ago, that rats had dug under the pavement in Triangular Park, and dozens of rats ran out of it.
Pest-control measures are also underway, as hundreds of pest control agencies are working across the state and it had caught around 150 rats from residential and commercial establishments in Kolkata in September.
The rodents can carry many diseases including hantavirus, leptospirosis, lymphocytic choriomeningitis (LCMV), Tularemia and Salmonella. The diseases can spread to people directly through handling of rats, contact with their feces, urine, saliva, or bites.
