Is the Fadnavis government rat-tled? What is this latest scam about?

Rats are a menace. And being a menace, they wreak havoc where they stay. But a scam involving them- can you imagine that?

Rats scooting around drains, lanes, and households is a common sight in India. Even government offices for that matter are not immune to the pestilence. But over 300,000 rats in the headquarters of one of the country’s richest states? That’s something.

So what’s worse than rodents chewing upstate files and cables? A senior legislator smelling a rat in the contract given to clear out the menace.

A senior leader of the BJP, which rules the western Indian state of Maharashtra, has revealed that last year a staggering 319,400 rats were cleared out from inside Mantralaya, the state’s secretariat in Mumbai.

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Speaking in the state legislative assembly on March 22, Eknath Khadse cited a government response to a Right to Information (RTI) query to say that chief minister Devendra Fadnavis’s government had invited bids in 2017 from companies to kill the rats. Khadse alleged that the contractor that won the bid later claimed to have removed all the rats in just seven days, instead of the several months allotted.

“It means (the contractor) killed 45,628.57 rats a day…It also means the company killed 31.68 rats every minute. Their weight was around 9,125.71 kg and every day one truck was required to take dead rats out of Mantralaya. But it is not known where they were disposed of,” he said in the assembly. “It is very surprising that this company killed over 300,000 rats in just seven days while the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (Mumbai’s civic body) took two years to kill 600,000 rats.”

He demanded an inquiry into the contractor’s claims, sniffing a “large-scale scam.” Khadse also alleged that the government had paid the company Rs1.5 per rat, a leading news agency reported.