Poorly paid ‘pied pipers’ keep Mumbai disease-free

By Rahul Bedi

Mumbai, India, Sept. 8 (IPS)— Suresh Kharva wears no masks to protect himself from infections. Armed with a crude wooden club and a torch, he scours the narrow, stinking alleyways every night to track down and kill some of the millions of rodents that have made this city, India’s financial capital, their home.

Kharva, 30, is a night rat killer, or NRK for short.

He slinks barefoot through piles of garbage and along walls of warehouses in the western port city’s affluent suburbs for fear of disturbing the vicious bandicoots, which have grown enormously fat from feeding off tons of rubbish thrown carelessly into the streets.

After blinding the rats with his torchlight and pinning them to the ground with the cleft wire at the end of his club, Kharva swiftly grabs the rodents by their tails and smashes them onto the ground in one smooth, remorseless motion.

Night after tiresome night, Kharva puts the bleeding carcasses into a filthy shoulder bag before continuing to comb the area in order to make up his daily quota of 30 rats. Without his catch, he would not be paid his nightly fee of six US dollars by his employers, Mumbai’s Municipal Corp.

“I often feel scared, as the rats sometimes attack and bite. But it’s the only way I have of feeding my family,” said Kharva, a night rat hunter for eight years now.

When unable to make up his nightly quota, he “ borrows” the shortfall from one of his luckier fellow rat killers with a bigger “bag.”

“I picked up my skills over the years,” said Nanji Jagadia, a fellow night rat hunter who works the south Mumbai alleyways with Kharva as part of a five-man team.

“But even now when I fail to strike a rat dead at the first blow, it sometimes attacks, viciously sinking its teeth into me. But it’s an occupational hazard and I have no choice,” he declared.

All of Mumbai’s “Pied Pipers” work six days a week and dare not complain of poor pay for the enormous service they render in a city reputed to be India’s wealthiest and home to the world’s biggest movie-making industry.

Being casual employees, they are not entitled to leave and are afraid of being replaced by one amongst thousands waiting to replace them, so they never fail to turn up for work.

Officials said over six million rats are dumped annually in garbage lots around the city.

Though some rat killers do graduate to permanent municipal jobs of laying rat traps and scattering poisoned pellets around rich residential neighborhoods, municipal officials prefer to keep them on as daily wagers. They claim their “productivity” declines the night rat killers are “elevated.”

Labor union activists working to improve the night rat killers’ lot said the hunters were frequently exposed to infection not only from rat bites, but from extended exposure to dead and bleeding rodents. This is because the municipal officers in charge of the nightly muster rarely arrive till late in the morning for a head count.

Municipal officials, however, are proud that no rat killer is known to have died either of plague or of rabies — both of which are spread by rats.

The plague outbreak in Surat in neighboring Gujarat state in 1994 spread panic across Mumbai that is the capital of western Maharashtra state, leading to a mass exodus of people from the area.

The rat flea is known to transmit the bacterium, which is responsible for spreading the plague when it bites human beings or other mammals.

“Mumbai was vulnerable to the plague. But we were vigilant and doubled the number of rats eliminated and successfully prevented plague from spreading in this city,” union activist Mahabal Shetty said.

Newspapers in Mumbai frequently report cases of rats attacking newborn babies in overcrowded hospital wards and even gnawing at guests at hotels in the city.

Fear of the rats and the disease they spread, such as plague, has opened up job opportunities in this employment-starved city. Municipal officials admitted that scores of cash-strapped graduates were amongst over 4,000 people who responded recently to some 42 vacancies for night rat killers.

“A lucky handful made it,” said Vasu Pujari, secretary of Mumbai’s Municipal Labor Union.

There is no dearth of rats, which breed fast not only on the vast sea of rubbish but on the grain stocks in the vast godowns that dot the city and are spilling over, thanks to successive years of bumper stocks.

At the moment, India has a surplus of 60 million tons of food grains with nowhere to store much of it except under flimsy tarpaulin cover. Rodents enjoy “first call” on the stocks. In fact, 20 percent of India’s food production is said to be eaten by rodents for lack of modern storage of processing.

Despite India’s much-hyped economic boom over the past decade, much of it centered on bustling Mumbai, unemployment and poverty have spiraled in this bustling city of nearly 20 million people.

Many go to bed hungry for lack of hard cash to buy the grain that is easily accessible to rats.

Over 60 percent of the city’s population lives in slums, many of which get inundated daily at high tide. Mumbai has Asia’s largest slum in Dharavi, where 3,000 people arrive daily to live and to seek their fortunes in a city famed as home to India’s rich and famous.

Most of the arrivals are quickly disillusioned, having to settle for stinking, crude mud structures in malarial backwaters ridden with disease, a local municipal officer said. Having left their poverty-ridden rural homes, they have no choice but to stay on and keep looking for jobs.

Rat killers, meanwhile, run not only the gauntlet of vicious rodents, but are often beaten up by Mumbai’s underworld. Beat policemen looking for a handout thrash them when they are unable to pay.

Said Kharva: “Every night, when I move into Mumbai’s streets, I do not know whether I will live to see the morning. But under the circumstances I have little choice.”