Calcutta: The Bengal government plans to deploy thousands of men and women to visit homes as part of its drive against vector borne diseases such as dengue, malaria and chikungunya.

At a meeting in the Assembly on Wednesday, chief minister Mamata Banerjee stressed regular house visits round the year to identify mosquito breeding sites.

The government has published a book, State Vector Borne Diseases Control and Seasonal Influenza Plan, 2018, detailing how various government departments should chalk out year-long plans to combat such diseases.

The meeting was attended by ministers and secretaries of health, urban development and municipal affairs, panchayat and public health engineering, animal resources, public works and education departments.

"Such an early effort... in the month of February... at the highest level of the administration is rare," a government official said.

"Usually the government starts to act after vector borne diseases take epidemic proportions," Manoj Chakraborty, Opposition chief whip and Behrampore MLA, said.

"Last year, too, despite our repeated attempts the government woke up very late."

Apart from house visits, the government has initiated plans to involve all government and state-aided schools to spread awareness among the students.

"We have asked the school education department to ensure that proper cleanliness and vector control activities are carried out at schools, especially during vacations," Chandrima Bhattacharya, minister of state for health, said.

The health department has developed a special software to detect which particular areas have vector borne diseases based on reports collected from home visits, Bhattacharya said.

"A dynamic monitoring team has been formed at the district level to oversee the vector control programmes round the year. It will be chaired by the district magistrates," she said.

The state government will ask state-run as well as private laboratories and hospitals to keep proper records of patients suffering from vector borne diseases and communicate it to the health department as dengue is a notified disease.

The municipal affairs department tabled and passed three bills for civic bodies across Bengal that will empower municipal authorities to charge penalty up to Rs 1 lakh for repeat offenders of mosquito breeding sites at homes or commercial places.

Bhattacharya said the chief minister had asked chief secretary Malay De to get central agencies like Metro Railway to cooperate with the state in its fight against vector borne diseases. "We don't have access to the central government offices and residential complexes and railway tracks to carry out vector control drives. The chief secretary has been asked to take it up with the Centre."