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CHAPTER V.
RECOMMENDATIONS.
The subject oí practical measures for the diminution of Malaria in
Salsette may be considered under two headings, prevention in existing villages,
and Prevention in new building areas.
PREVENTION IN EXISTING VILLAGES.—It is here the in-
digenous population that has to be thought of, both in its own interests and in
those of the citizens of Bombay. While, in the abstract, the indigenous popula-
tion of any malarious táluka of the Thána District is as deserving of protection as
that of any other, there is a strong practical reason for devoting special attention
to the case of the villagers of Salsette, in the proximity of this highly infected
area to the City of Bombay, even if the tendency to suburban building is left
out of account.
Without prejudice to anything recommended under the second heading
it may at once be said here that in rural Salsette anything like a general attack
on the breeding-places of the mosquito is out of the question. We are not here,
as in Bombay, dealing with a series of artificial breeding-places, localized over
a limited area of very valuable ground, but with natural breeding-places widely
distributed over a large tract of country, most of which is of no greater value
than such rice or forest-land would be in any other part of the Presidency.
The only series of breeding-places that can be abolished, and should be
abolished, is the chain of borrow-pits along the B. B. & C. I, Railway, which, as
already pointed out, continue to pour forth mosquitos in October, weeks after
all the natural breeding-places in the neighbourhood have dried up. The line
runs through a distinctly malarious tract of country from where it leaves
Andheri Station to where it emerges on to the alluvial salt-lands at a point
between Borivli and Bháyndar Stations, a little to the North of Dahisar
village. The worst part of this region is that north and south of Goregaon
Station.
The simplest way of dealing with borrow-pits is to run them into one
another by a connecting channel, and to have outlets here and there into
nullahs, as they occur. But as the Railway Company has already taken up the
necessary land for the quadrupling of the line the opportunity should be taken,
when construction work is in progress, to abolish the old borrow-pits altogether,
and to see that no new ones are left either. Exactly how they shall, provide
materials for the extension of embankments is a matter for the railway engineers
to settle. The only principal that has to be laid down is one which is coming
to be well understood in connection with engineering in the tropics, that
excavations should be made in such a way that they will drain promptly and
completely into the nearest water-course.
It would be well if the due observance of this principle were in future
made a regular condition of the acquisition of land by railway companies.
Though, with this exception, breeding-places cannot be attacked there
is some evidence that it would be worth while to attack the resting-places of
mosquitos. The extraordinary immunity from Malaria enjoyed by those whose
villages are outside the tree and grass-covered area, and are completely accessible
to the sea-breezes, is an obvious indication to expose to the sea-breezes as far as
possible villages less happily situated. Every encouragement should be given
to those who own or occupy the grass-lands of villages to cut the grass early,
and keep it cut, in the actual vicinity of both villages and hamlets, and also to
cut it early and keep it cut, on the side of any hill which may command a
village or hamlet. While people cannot be expected to do without trees to
shade their actual houses, the presence of a space free of trees as wide as possible
around the village site will tend to promote the necessary ventilation, and the
presence of brushwood or undergrowth of any sort in the vicinity of villages
should in any possible way be discouraged.
While a great proportion of the adults in malarious places have
acquired immunity by slow degrees, or are alive merely as examples of the
H 629—(3