A Pied Piper for Kalupur station

After spending lakhs on unreliable contractors promising to rid the station of rats, the railways now look for a specialist
By Yogesh Avasthi
Posted On Wednesday, April 08, 2009 (Ahmedabad Mirror : http://www.ahmedabadmirror.com/index.aspx?Page=article&sectname=News%20-%20City&sectid=3&contentid=200904082009040803453018661dcaa76)
The last pest control agency railways hired, gave up after a year. A new quotation has been sought nowRailways are at war with rats, and are losing it. They’ve tried everything in the book to check the menace at the city railway station, but the rodents are outwitting them hands down. Nothing is working. Fuming them out of holes, poison baits, lakhs spent on pest-control specialists have all failed. Alas, they don’t make Pied Pipers anymore.

The railways’ Ahmedabad division spends Rs 5 lakh on rodent-control for a two-year contract. Several agencies have been tried out, but none has been able to produce results. The last one walked out mid-way and returned the railways Rs 2.5 lakh of the amount it had taken.The authorities are now looking to hire only agencies that have an R&D department, for all existing methods have failed and only a novel trick may click. The large rats, in the mean time, are growing more and more plump and their numbers just burgeoning.

Attempts to smoke them out with toxic gas have flopped miserably. This, because underneath what seems an unmistakable rat hole is a maze of ‘tunnels’ the rodents have bored. Some run hundreds of meters and criss-cross the entire station area.

Even surfacing platforms and the ground below the tracks with concrete has had little effect. The rats have burrowed holes at places where the concrete was withering. Every time the railways gas the rat holes with the hope of getting them to crawl out, the rats escape through the many tunnels underground. Within moments, they can get half-a-mile away from where the gas has been released. So if a rodent has run into a hole on platform No 6, it can well surface on platform No 1, or anywhere else. As for poison baits, the rats are too smart to fall for them. Balls of kneaded dough laced with poison are hardly an attraction for the rats.

There is just too much of better fare on offer. Kneaded dough can’t match up with the choicest leftovers available in plenty on the tracks. And in the event a rat does nibble on the dough, it immediately realises it is poison-laced and leaves it alone. Thereafter, not a single one of its ilk goes anywhere near the dough, say railway staff.

Senior Divisional Commercial Manager Udayshankar Jha said, “The last pest-control agency we hired tried its best but gave up after a year. We have now sought a quotation from the Central Warehouse Department, who have specialised techniques to deal with all kinds of situations.”

Railways and the rat race

Underworld dons

Everytime railways gas the rat holes, the rats escape through underground tunnels. If it runs into a hole on Platform 6, it resurfaces on Platform 1
Everyday, a hole-y day

Surfacing platforms and ground below the tracks with concrete has had little effect. The rats have burrowed holes at these places
Rat baaki, bait baaki

Balls of kneaded dough laced with poison are hardly an attraction. They can’t match up with the choicest leftovers available on railway tracks