Millions of rodents have created havoc in the north-eastern state of Mizoram, who have arrived with the flowering of bamboos.
NEW DELHI: The Pied Piper may have succeeded in drowning the menacing rats into a river, but a calamity in Mizoram is waiting to get its Pied Piper.
Millions of rodents have created havoc in the north-eastern state of Mizoram, who have arrived with the flowering of bamboos. The rodent population initially feed on bamboo seeds but once the seeds are not available, they shift to other corps, especially paddy. In its distress message to the Centre, Mizoram government said “the devastation is beyond human control”.
According to the official estimates of the state government around 35,000 families and 38,184 hectares of area has been affected, and there is a loss of 12,620 metric tones of paddy. The devastation wrecked by the rats would multiply the losses from around 51 per cent to around 80 per cent for the next year, officials say.
So mammoth is the devastation that it has acquired calamity proportions. The National Disaster Management Authority was swung into action by the Union government, who sent a 10 member inter-ministerial team, including experts from various parts of the country, to make a spot assessment of the situation and suggest ways to deal with the problem.
The Central government team headed by a joint secretary in the agriculture ministry UKS Chauhan, with members from Planning Commission, ministry of science and technology, finance ministry, environment and forest, ministry of food, ministry of rural development, rodent specialist from national plant protection training institute, returned to Delhi on Sunday after a week-long assessment.
The mice menace where number of rats multiply almost like bacteria, causing havoc to life of people and paddy harvest, is linked with what Mizo people call ‘Mautam’, that occurs every 48 years. The problem had last occurred in 1959, when Mizoram was part of undivided Assam.
Unable to contain the problem by other human means, the state has devised a formula - give incentives to the locals who kill the rats. An official who visited the state as part of the central team told DNA that the locals have innovative methods to catch and kill the rats.
A report prepared by Mizoram’s department of disaster management, which has been submitted to the Union government says, “This extraordinary phenomenon visits the state every 48 years or so when there is a gregarious flowering of bamboos. The bamboos form around 40 per cent of the total forest area in the state. Among many species of bamboos, the one that causes the problem is called Melcana Bammusoides and Bambusa Tulda.
“The rodents are never seen during daytime. They hide in thick jungle and come out only in the night to feed on the crop. Hence, the problem of mass killings of the rats. It has been seen that acres and acres of paddy fields have been eaten by the rats in a single night”, the report says.
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