‘No scarcity of food, water for Patna zoo inmates’

PATNA: Amid the 21-day nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19, the district administration is ensuring that the inmates of the Sanjay Gandhi Biological Park, commonly known as the Patna zoo, get food, water and health care facilities on time.
Environment, forest and climate change department principal secretary Dipak Kumar Singh told this newspaper on Thursday that the home ministry on Wednesday issued fresh guidelines covering additional people and services, who would be exempted from the lockdown.
“Staff and workers, who look after zoos, nurseries, wildlife, fire fighting in forests, watering plantations, patrolling and their necessary transport movement, are also exempted from the purview of the lockdown now,” Singh said and added, “We have more than five crore plants in our nurseries and if no one looks after them for three weeks, they will be destroyed.”
Face masks have been provided to the 60 zoo staff are working in three different shifts to take care of the animals. Zoo director Amit Kumar said, “We have a deep freezer to store fish that come in bulk from Andhra Pradesh. The district administration is also supplying fresh items like beef, mutton, chicken, fruits and vegetables for the zoo inmates.”
In 1979, the state government had declared the zoo as an ‘essential service’ under the Bihar Essential Services Maintenance Act.
“Under this Act, the zoo staff are granted leave on the basis of duty rosters. In fact, only the Patna and Delhi zoos have been notified as essential services,” Amit said.
This is the second time that the zoo has been shut for visitors for such a long time. Earlier, it was closed for 49 days from December 25, 2018 to February 11, 2019.
Meanwhile, the zoo staff are carrying out proper sanitization of the premises regularly. They said the animals were relaxed and enjoying the peaceful environment with no visitors around.