It is a battle Vellalore residents have been waging night and day for the past few days. Their opponents: flies and mosquitoes whose number has increased as a result of the recent rain.
The winged insects invade the residents’ homes to fly around every inch of space available, not let them clean the space in front of houses for kolam , boil milk, soak clothes, cook food or even take a nap.
Everywhere and at all times are flies and mosquitoes, complains L. Nagarathnam, a resident of Om Sakthi Nagar.
She, like other residents, has sealed windows and other openings in her house with nets to keep away the insects but they have managed to breach her defence. “I still find a few dozens in my house every day.” Even efforts to shoo them away with phenyl-mopped floors have only provided temporary results.
In a nearby eatery, owner Rajesh Govind is busy pushing his snack into a closed container to attract customers and dissuade flies. “I wait for the snack to lose the heat to stuff them inside the transparent container so that I can serve them to customers.”
The complaints throw light on the day-to-day suffering the residents of Vellalore have been undergoing for the past few days, which the area activist J. Daniel attributes to the Coimbatore Corporation’s dump yard.
Mismanagement as a result of poor supervision has led to a state where the dump yard has turned into a breeding ground for flies and mosquitoes. The Corporation claims it sprays pesticide but the truth seems to be otherwise.
“If the civic body or the agency it has contracted to do the job does spray pesticides, why is it that there are flies,” he asks and says that it only points to the larger mismanagement at the yard.
The Corporation has not clearly said how many tonnes the contracted agency, Coimbatore Integrated Waste Management Company Limited, segregates into organic and recyclable waste. And, how much manure it generates from the organic waste.
In short, there is no transparency, he alleges.
Sources in the civic body say that in addition to the 2,000 – 3,000 litres of effective micro-organism solution that is sprayed on wastes in lorries at the weighbridge in Vellalore, each of the five workers are engaged in spraying 175 litres of pesticides to control flies. If there are complaints, the civic body will attend to it, they promise.
