Krishnanagar, Sept. 27: Bengal government would confer ‘Swasthya Bandhab Sharad Sanman’ to the puja committees in the rural areas who would take a proactive role to ensure cleanliness and create awareness in the locality so as to prevent dengue and other vector-borne diseases during the ensuing festive season.
The public health wing of the state panchayat and rural development department has directed the district administrations to consider conferring the award to the puja committees in the rural areas who would ensure preventive measures pursuing the guidelines issued last week by the department in the wake of the increasing trend of the dengue cases.
The award carries a special citation in recognition of the role of the puja committees towards public health protection and awareness.
The prime objective behind the program is to ensure people’s participation in an environment where infrastructure for sanitation is poor.
An official of the public health wing said, “Our aim is to spread the message – a celebration with caution – that begins with cleanliness”. With this objective, the state panchayat and rural development department has already launched a state-wide campaign from September 15 which would continue up to October 2.
The initiatives include visual cleanliness, cleaning vulnerable garbage sites in villages, and drains, community awareness of segregation of waste at source, construction of waste segregation and collection shed cleaning areas adjacent to waterbodies, and others.
While ensuring these cleanliness drives requires the collective involvement of people and administration, puja committees have been specifically instructed on effective management of the environment during the festive days.
The panchayat department has advised all the Zilla Parishad to ensure the guidelines and to appraise the puja committees about the importance of the initiative in the spike of dengue cases across the state.
“Officially we would engage our team and workers to implement the guidelines. But at the same time participation of the puja committees to keep their areas clean is also very important. This is highly required in absence of sanitation workers in rural areas across the state. There are a few exceptions, but most of the panchayat bodies in the state do have not sufficient sanitation workers, and cleaning of drainage is done on regular basis. So participation of individuals and organized groups like puja committees is very important to combat the spread of diseases like dengue which is in an increasing trend”, an official of the public health wing.
In Bengal Dengue is continued to rise on an alarming note as the total number of attacks has crossed the 15000 mark. During the past 24 hours around 850 new cases has been reported with a district like North 24 Parganas, Howrah, Kolkata, Hooghly, Murshidabad, South 24 Parganas, Jalpaiguri, and Darjeeling districts recording most of the cases.
Public health experts say that increasing urbanization in an underdeveloped rural infrastructure is one of the key reasons behind the spreading of dengue.
“Time has come that individuals should come up to take part in cleaning the drains in their localities, not just the ones adjacent to their plots since depending on panchayat could land them in trouble with vector-borne diseases”, said Bibartan Bhattacharyya, a science activist working on public health in Nadia.
“It is unfortunate that the state government became proactive before puja only and realized the need for people’s participation when the dengue situation went out of control. The government has realized that it cannot singlehandedly combat the dengue attack. There was not sufficient rain in several areas of Bengal. In case of incessant rain the drains would have been naturally cleaned washing out the larvae of mosquitoes”, added Bhattacharyya.
Maloy Biswas, assistant secretary of Nadia’s Karimpur Ramkrishnapally Hospitalpara Durgapuja committee said, “As instructed by the district administration we have undertaken a cleanliness and awareness drive to combat dengue. We have slapped posters, cleaned drains, sprayed bleaching powders, and segregated garbage to ensure cleanliness to prevent mosquito attacks”.
Senior Trinamul leader and state government employees federation’s mentor Manoj Chakroborty said, “Honoring rural puja committees for dengue prevention endeavor is a well-timed gesture by the state government. People working with the government can make things better always. Such a step should have been taken much earlier in the interest of public health.