With the dengue mosquitoes attacking more and more people in the city and districts, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation decided to open a helpline number for citizens to find out information on availability of beds in various hospitals.

The decision was made following a high-level meeting chaired by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation mayor, Firhad Hakim and deputy mayor Atin Ghosh with the senior officials of the civic body today. The meeting was held with the health officers of all the 16 boroughs of the KMC along with the officials of the solid waste management and other wings of the civic body today.

According to the deputy mayor, KMC is to provide information on both state-run and private hospitals to the citizens. The health officers of the 16 boroughs under KMC have been asked to be in touch with private hospitals in their respective areas and keep information on the avail ability of beds through a Whatsapp group. After gathering the required information, the KMC would open a helpline number providing information to the citizens on the availability of beds in the next seven to 10 days.

The civic body would also provide 100 additional beds in the urban community health centre and hospital near Kidderpore Tram Depot that presently has a provision for 40 beds.
The additional beds are to be used particularly as part of the dengue fever clinic. Apart from this, 200 beds have been reserved at Islamia Hospital so that those can be used for providing initial level of treatment for dengue.

Following the high-level meeting, the KMC has also decided to crack the whip on people throwing garbage on vacant lands and ponds.According to the deputy mayor, there are many vacant plots that were cleared by the KMC last year but were littered again and the civic body had to redo the exercise.

To prevent such a scenario, the KMC would now issue notices to the residents living around the vacant lands and throwing waste into it. “It has been decided that the residents around the vacant land and pond throwing garbage into those, would be issued a notice for violating the municipal rules. If required they would also be fined. A case would also be filed against those residents who would be proved of throwing garbage into vacant lands or ponds after a local enquiry,” informed Mr Ghosh.

Not only vacant lands or ponds, following the dengue scare, the civic body has also declared to go stern on under construction structures.
“If vulnerable spots of larvae breeding are found in an under-construction area, a notice is to be issued to the building owners for taking measures to clear the space and follow the steps. If the instructions are not complied with, in seven days, the building department would have to take action to stop the construction activities,” added the deputy mayor.

If the building department officials do not take steps for strict compliance of stopping the construction, they would be issued a show cause notice and action would be taken against them. Meanwhile, the civic body has started the repairing of roads under it after getting a list of vulnerable stretches from the city police.
The Kolkata Police is said to have sent a list of more than 300 stretches of roads that need repair.