Chickens being culled in Kamrangaguri in Jalpaiguri district on Sunday. (Kundan Yolmo)

Siliguri, Jan. 4: The sale of poultry and eggs has been banned within 10km of the bird flu-affected areas of Matigara. The entire Siliguri town and Rajganj block of Jalpaiguri district will come under the ban.

“It will be implemented from tomorrow,” Sarad Dwivedi, the subdivisional officer of Siliguri, said at a news conference this evening.

The administration had announced the presence of the H5N1 virus yesterday after reports arrived from the High Security Animal Diseases Laboratory in Bhopal, which had tested the samples collected from dead chickens.

Matigara I and II, Champasari, Sukna, Atharokhai, Jalas and Patharghata are the gram panchayats where the avian flu has been detected. Besides, 34 wards of the Siliguri Municipal Corporation (out of 47) are also affected. Some of these wards are in the Rajganj block. The unaffected wards are from 21-24 and 35-43.

“Twenty-four teams, comprising five employees of the animal resource development (ARD) department, two staff members of the block concerned and an equal number of policemen, have culled 3,500 till 9pm,” Dwivedi told The Telegraph later. The culling will continue till midnight. The administration had set a target of 60,000 birds to be culled in the next few days.

Unlike in Malda, where culling teams had to face stiff resistance in several villages under Narhatta gram panchayat, culling here was peaceful and steady.

The bird flu scare from Friday had started affecting poultry sales from yesterday morning. The traders claimed that there has been a drop in the price of chicken in different markets across the town and its surroundings.

“We have been forced to reduce the price in different markets here to Rs 50-55 per kg. It usually varies between Rs 70 and Rs 80 per kg,” said Ratan Pal, the secretary of the Siliguri Poultry Byabsayee Samiti, which has more than 500 members.

Pal said the sale had been affected since the detection of the flu in Malda. “Since then, the state governments of Sikkim and Assam had banned the movement of poultry and eggs from the region.”