Ready for Holi in Bird Flu Ground Zero

After nearly a month of culling, digging and burying, Navapur wants to celebrate. As officials wrap up the second phase of their 8216;145...

After nearly a month of culling, digging and burying, Navapur wants to celebrate. As officials wrap up the second phase of their 8216;8216;battle against bird flu,8217;8217; the pre-dominantly tribal surrounding of Navapur is preparing itself for five days of singing and dancing.

While Meena Patil supervises the final cleaning of her coops at Sagar Poultry farms, not very far, Poonabai has just finished mud-plastering her little shop. Both are in a hurry 8212; Patil to bury the past and Poonabai to start a fresh future.

8216;8216;We want to finish and join everyone in Holi celebrations,8217;8217; says Jayant Gaekwad, the Nandurbar collector who is still camping in Navapur, days after the media spotlight was turned off on the town. 8216;8216;Our teams are working round the clock to try and finish destroying all poultry related material by March 14. Then we will take a break before getting back to another round of disinfection.8217;8217; The national teams that spent a week in Navapur culling birds have gone home. They have now been replaced by a tribal labour force, uncomfortable behind their flimsy masks and wobbly in their gumboots.

Stuffy in 8216;8216;too many clothes,8217;8217; workers in Patil8217;s farm keep pulling off their masks, which they hurriedly put on as the booming voice of the supervisor comes across the pit dug to bury the waste. 8216;8216;We are insisting that they are well protected,8217;8217; says Dr P. Anbalagan, CEO of the Zilla Parishad and the in-house vet. 8216;8216;Almost 11,000 personnel protective equipment are being supplied to them, including gumboots, gloves and masks.8217;8217;

Keeping a watch on everything are health workers like B.D. Raut and M.D. Paradkar, who are working from a bench under a shady tree outside Vohra Poultries. Hijacked from their training in Aurangabad, these Hingoli officials maintain daily health records of all the labour used in three farms under their supervision. 8216;8216;Besides ensuring they take safety precautions, we are also monitoring their health,8217;8217; says Raut. 8216;8216;We give them Tamiflu tablets everyday and check their temperature. So far all is well.8217;8217;

Except for the more prominently placed 8220;Do Not Enter8221; boards on farm gates, streets littered with glove wrappings and mounds of freshly dug earth, Navapur is pretty much back to normal. Access to the town is open for all. For the time being, Navapur seems to have learnt to live with the masks and precautions. On the future, a sceptical Gulam Mohammad Vohra believes that it will take at least six months for them to get started. Armed with Poultry International magazines and sheets of conspiracy theories downloaded from the Internet, Vohra is still waiting for the government to start distributing compensations. Like all other poultry owners, the business aspect of restarting will be worked out only once the JCB machines stop digging holes to bury their farms chicken feed, feathers, droppings.

And most of them have reconciled to a Holi without their favourite spicy chicken curry. 8216;8216;It will not be the same without the chickens, but we will celebrate anyway,8217;8217; says Naresh Sakaram Gavit, a tribal farmer from Barvihir village, on the fringes of Navapur. 8216;8216;For five days we will sing, dance and burn bonfires. And then we will sit down for our festival meal, this time just dal-bhaat.8217;8217;

NAVAPUR8217;S COUNT

8226; Number of birds culled by the government: 2,53,063 from 17 poultries

8226; Number of culled birds in backyard poultry: 70,616

8226; Number of eggs destroyed: 14,45,604

8226; Total farms sanitised: 48