Civic teams not sighted even after death of 13-year-old girl in dengue: Residents
Telegraph | 23 June 2025
A day after a 13-year-old girl died of dengue, neighbours in the Dum Dum Cantonment area said they had not seen any vector control team working in the area even on Sunday.
Saroni Banerjee, a Class VII student in a school in the area, died on Saturday. The family members said she had returned from school with a fever on June 9 and was first admitted to a hospital run by the municipality and then shifted to a private hospital, where she died. The cause of death, written in the death certificate, mentioned dengue shock syndrome.
Metro saw pools of stagnant water and heaps of solid waste in the area on Sunday.
An under-construction building next to where the girl lived had stagnant water on the terrace. Moss had formed on the terrace, suggesting that waterlogging on the terrace was not new.
Stagnant water was also found in passages of multiple houses in the neighbourhood when Metro visited the area on Sunday.
Experts said any pool of water that remains undisturbed for more than seven days can become a mosquito breeding site. Discarded containers can turn into mosquito breeding sites if water accumulates in them.
Swapna Majumdar, a resident of Manujendra Dutta Road, alleged that the under-construction building has been there for five years. “The owner, builder or the municipality never cleans the building. Workers from the municipality broom the portions outside the building once in a while,” said Majumdar.
When this newspaper visited the terrace on Sunday morning, at least an inch of water had accumulated on the terrace, which also suggested that the water outlets had clogged because of a lack of cleaning.
Namita Das, who lives opposite the house where Saroni lived, said she did not see any civic team spraying larvicides in the area so far this monsoon. “They came only twice last year,” she said.
Experts said vector-control measures, which include destroying possible mosquito breeding sites, are essential in the fight against dengue and other vector-borne diseases.
Harendra Singh, the chairman of Dum Dum Municipality where Saroni lived, refuted the allegations of poor vector control measures.
“Our team went to the neighbourhood the day we came to know that she had tested positive for dengue. We undertake vector control measures throughout the year,” he said.
Singh said a vector control team from the state urban development agency (SUDA) was supposed to visit the neighbourhood on Sunday.
“They did not come. I think they will come on Monday,” he said.
An official of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said that the civic body in Calcutta sends teams for a scan of the neighbourhood if any dengue death is reported.
It also checks how many times its vector control teams have visited the area in the past month. The measures are taken to identify any gaps in vector control activities.
Saroni’s mother told this newspaper on Saturday that the Class VII student returned from school with a fever on June 9.
The family had visited Digha about a fortnight ago, she said.
The family consulted a local doctor, but when the fever persisted, they admitted her to a hospital run by the South Dum Dum Municipality on June 17.
Doctors at the hospital informed the family on June19 that she had further deteriorated and needed life support.
The family then took her to a private hospital in Dum Dum, and later shifted her to a “less expensive hospital” in Topsia, where she passed away on Saturday morning.