Chicken & egg: Crisis and Redemption

Chicken & egg: Crisis and Redemption

We have learned Rapid Deployment, Crisis Management, Organisational Responsiveness, things like this, from the military and management theory. And sometimes, like right now, the government can make a breathtakingly good job of showing how well they’ve learned their lessons. Accompanied, of course, by the Indian media, print, radio and electronic, all desi clones of CNN, adept at getting rapidly to “ground zero” and “breaking news.”

The combined onslaught of the culling and the front-page news was so intense and immense that it must have destroyed the dreaded H5N1 virus if it ever had the temerity to come to India in the first place. We’ve seen this kind of germicidal hesitation before- when the “plague” came to Surat in 1994. First, the “bubonic” plague, notorious from medieval times, managed just 3 infections (all victims recovered fully), before switching to its more contagious “pneumonic” version, eventually killing 56 after creating a general panic with a quarter of Surat’s population (600,000 people), running away before a quarantine was put in place. In Navapur this time, by way of contrast, movements in and out were controlled at first information. With regard to Surat, the prevailing consensus was that in 1994, plague, confronted by Tetracycline, had absolutely no scope to play Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Besides, it must be understood by the WHO and the world, our standard issue Surati diamond worker was accustomed to living amongst mountains of municipal refuse and not averse to using a passing rat as a side pillow. In the aftermath, Surat became the cleanest municipality in the country, winning awards for the achievement several years running. The next outbreak of pneumonic plague, at Himachal Pradesh in 2002, barely rated a passing mention, armed as we were with Tetracycline, rat poison and past experience.

During the current “avian” attempt, the authorities have done us proud. Take the statistics revealed by one Mr B. Gagrani, the Maharashtra government spokesman, from his perch at the Secretariat in Mumbai: culled chicken in Navapur and a 10 km. radius between Saturday 18th and Wednesday 22nd February 2006 - 1,94,124 poultry farm birds and another 14,669 of the walkabout type from the backyard co-operatives. Also destroyed: 3,66,000 eggs in the same time-frame.

In addition, Mr. Gagrani said, a house-to-house search of Navapur district revealed 237 persons with low-grade fever cowering in their homes but none were deemed “serious”. Further, blood samples from 151 persons who came into “direct contact” with the “infected” birds were sent to The National Institute of Virology at Pune and The National Institute of Communicable Diseases in New Delhi for sophisticated analyses. Of this number, 12 persons were placed in the isolation ward at Navapur Hospital suspected of being infected with something out of the ordinary. Happily, the media reports of Friday 24th February, 2006 have revealed that none of the persons isolated, or indeed the long list of 151, have bird flu. One person in the isolation ward does have something strange but it doesn’t look like “avian influenza” anyhow.

Meanwhile, The Secretary, Union Ministry of Health, Mr. P.K.Hota, said in New Delhi that an additional 73,157 birds had been destroyed at unspecified locations in Gujarat. The total number culled in Maharashtra, including the Navapur region, is 2,08,892.With a blindingly rare prescience, Mr Hota opined, on the self-same Wednesday 22nd, when all was by no means clear, that, he expected any persons that tested positive for bird flu, to only develop “mild” symptoms.

The only ones unhappy with how things have turned out are some poultry industry personnel in the eye of the Navapur storm lamenting the “murder” of their “healthy” fowl and insurers wearing a grim look, kicking themselves for not having included “avian influenza” amongst the exceptions not qualifying for compensation.

The Indian Poultry Sector overall has been doing very well both domestically and in the export market. It is the 4th largest producer of eggs in the world – an estimated 3,000 crore eggs per annum. India ranks 8th in broiler production with an output of 100 crore birds tantamount to 7,50,000 tonnes of chicken. The poultry sector employs 100 million people, between the organized and desi sectors and accounts for about 2% of the GDP. At present, just four states: Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab and Tamilnadu account for more than 50% of our poultry industry.

There’s a tremendous growth trajectory as well but it will have to be defended with better practices and precautions to prevent future outbreaks. In the meantime, with “Tamiflu” and friends at the ready, the industry is planning the great big Tandoori and Butter Chicken extravaganza, complete with lashings of Bollywood. It’s so feelgood for once that it reminds me of the gala banquet at the end of an Asterisk adventure.

(800 words)

Friday, 24th February 2006
Also published in The Pioneer, Sunday 26th February, 2006 www.dailypioneer.com

By Gautam Mukherjee
CEO, Indus Overseas