The Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation (BMC) will launch a clean-up drive across Salt Lake on Monday.
The drive is being undertaken to ensure that waste lying along streets and on vacant plots does not turn into breeding grounds for the dengue-causing Aedes aegypti mosquito. Special teams will visit areas to clear out the garbage.
A senior BMC health department official said they wanted to minimise the areas where mosquitoes can breed. The clean-up drive will start based on the feedback from a recent survey of all 52 blocks in the township.
"In order to combat dengue cleanliness is one of the biggest aspects. We need to ensure that we don't have garbage lying on the roads. Our teams will start working in phases," the BMC official said.
Public health experts have repeatedly said that ensuring cleanliness and preventing the accumulation of water were key vector-control measures in the fight against dengue as the Aedes mosquito can breed in even a coin-sized blob of water.
Rain leads to the accumulation of water on discarded waste items which are potential mosquito-breeding grounds. This newspaper spotted discarded plastic cups, styrofoam trays, tyres and used sanitary ware scattered by the road near City Centre, close to the Baisakhi Market and behind Calcutta University’s Salt Lake campus.
According to the official, the combined teams have been formed by looping in employees from the civic body's health department and solid waste management department and vector control teams.
Each team will be designated a block where they not only clean up the garbage but also spray larvicide before moving out.
Individual vector control teams on the other hand have been asked by the civic body to spray larvicide in their areas every seven days.
Over the past seven days, eight fresh dengue cases have been reported from BMC areas. Till Friday, the total number of dengue cases in the BMC area since January stood at 65.
Banibrata Banerjee, the mayoral council member in charge of health, said that this drive will be extended to all 41 wards of the BMC, including places like Kestopur, Baguiati and parts of Rajarhat.