Click to play videoNavapur: West Bengal is dealing with bird flu but poultry owners in Maharashtra's Navapur are also in trouble.
There's a sudden drop in demand for poultry products in the area, which made news two years ago as the first place in India to report bird flu.
Till early 2006 poultry farms in Navapur hummed with activity and business was brisk and profits were soaring. A poultry farm owner, Afzal Saiyed, had just taken a loan of Rs 10 lakh.
But when bird flu struck the area in early 2006, it spelt doom for poultry farmers like Afzal. Their lives changed forever and Afzal now earns a living by selling milk.
"Government has only paid for the birds they have killed. Our birds died earlier. We are suffering because of the loss," says Saiyed.
Nearly half the poultry farms still remain shut in Navapur on the Maharashtra-Gujarat border. Now, news of the bird flu in West Bengal is causing unease among those who weathered the crisis in 2006
"No one is ready to buy our eggs. If this situation persists then all farmers will suffer," another poultry farm owner Arif Balesaria says,
Poultry farmers say that after the outbreak in West Bengal, there's a sharp drop in demand.
Only 30 per cent of the eggs are now being purchased. The price per egg has already fallen from Rs 1.75 to Re One and of every chicken from Rs 14 to Rs 10 rupees.
The price of broiler chicken, too, has dropped from Rs 37 per kg to Rs 25 per kg.
Nearly two years on, the fear of an uncertain future is haunting poultry farmers of Navapur once again.
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