The clean-up begins

In Mumbai, the Maharashtra government decided to seal the nearly 10-km periphery of Navapur town and cull nearly nine lakh chickens to contain the spread of bird flu. To dispel fears, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said that the outbreak was limited to Navapur and no other part of the state was under the scanner.

He said residents of 19 villages in the 3 km radius of Navapur were under strict medical surveillance with a door-to-door survey being conducted for any flu symptoms, while an isolation ward had been set up at Navapur to treat any suspected bird flu case.

Already two persons, a 40-year-old woman and her son, have been isolated in Navapur while 20 persons from infected poultry farms have been subjected to pathological examinations, reports of which are awaited from the National Institute of Virology, Pune, Deshmukh said.

In Navapur, an exhausted state Animal Husbandry official told The Indian Express: “In most farms we went to, the birds had already been culled. Now all we can do is disinfect these places. And in the other cases, where there are still birds, we don’t have machines to dig. We are waiting for them to be organised.”

While they wait, under the already dug up mounds, the town with a population of just about 30,000 has already buried its entire economy. “All the staff has been sent home,” says Shoaib Pathan, supervisor of Sheesh poultry farm. “We killed our hens and sent the staff home. For any other information, contact my owner.”

In Navapur, the bird flu is still not a complete reality. Over the weekend, while the Centre declared a bird flu emergency and an unsure state government eventually took the same line, there is completed denial on Ground Zero.

Venkateshwara Hatcheries, the largest suppliers of chicks in Navapur, are still talking about the Ranikhet disease. “Unless we see the Bhopal reports, we are not ready to believe this is a case of bird flu,” says Janak Desai, deputy general manger of Venkateshwara Biosentry Ltd. “This is a conspiracy to push the Indian poultry industry into the backseat.”

Big poultry farm owners agree and say that it is too early to declare a bird flu emergency. “Nothing seems conclusive yet,” they say, arguing in the same breath for an increase in the Rs 40 per bird compensation. The entire town is heatedly debating the issue, with numerous conspiracy theories being thrown in for good measure.

Ministers and officials are zooming in and out of the town, each with his own take on the subject. The government hospital is splashed with internet printouts on the viral.

And far from all the confusion, the small farm owner is still counting his losses. “We had absolutely no idea that this was going to be so large scale,” says a despondent Afsar Sayed of Avis farms. “Every year birds die around this season and till Saturday morning we believed the Pune reports that it was Ranikhet disease. As our birds were dying we were burying them. But when the numbers went up, we just had to butcher them. Then we are told it is bird flu.”

Sayed invested Rs 15 lakh in his farm when the poultry business was picking up in Navapur in the early ’90s. Every month he spends up to Rs eight lakh to feed his birds and a few years ago he took a loan of of Rs five lakh to modify his farm. “Now we have lost everything. The last few eggs that our hens laid will be destroyed and then we will try and figure out our next move.”

While the 60 farm owners fight for compensation, the 5,600 people employed in these farms have simply been sent home with an uncertain future in hand. Government officials from both Maharashtra and Gujarat are now desperately trying to identify all the people directly associated with the poultry business, which is registered as a small-scale industry in the state.

Face masks in place and addresses in hand, health officials fanned out across the “compact poultry tehsil” trying to gauge the extent of the problem. With no bio safety rules in place and the government playing no role in regulating these farms, the virus has spread fast.

The problem was first noticed in mid-January. “But we were not kept in the picture,” says State Animal Husbandry ministry Anees Ahmad. “As they died, truck drivers just dumped them on the highways. The damage would have been less if we had been informed on time.”