Pe­nal/Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion chair­man Gow­tam Ma­haraj in­tends to seek as­sis­tance from the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture to ad­dress grow­ing con­cerns about un­se­cured bi­son and cows roam­ing the re­gion.

Ma­haraj con­firmed this in a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day, fol­low­ing last week’s fa­tal in­ci­dent in­volv­ing 31-year-old Ka­mal Kaladeen. 

An au­top­sy is ex­pect­ed to be per­formed on Kaladeen at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre to­mor­row.

Kaladeen, a land­scap­er, lived alone in a camp at See­bal­ack Trace, Rochard Road. Ac­cord­ing to his co-work­er, Kaladeen was dropped off at his camp at 9.30 pm on April 29. When the co-work­er re­turned around 7 am the next day, he found Kaladeen’s life­less body on the ground be­hind the camp.

There were blue-black marks on his chest.  

The co-work­er al­so not­ed that Kaladeen had pre­vi­ous­ly com­plained about an­i­mals at­tack­ing him, though he had nev­er been in­jured be­fore.

Res­i­dents of the Rochard Road com­mu­ni­ty told Guardian Me­dia that herds of bi­son fre­quent­ly roam the area, dam­ag­ing crops and leav­ing res­i­dents scared.

In re­sponse, Ma­haraj point­ed out that the process of im­pound­ing an­i­mals is dif­fi­cult due to sys­temic and bu­reau­crat­ic ob­sta­cles, in­clud­ing the lack of fa­cil­i­ties to house them.

Not­ing the re­gion is a farm­ing com­mu­ni­ty, he added that farm­ers have suf­fered se­vere loss­es due to an­i­mals eat­ing and tram­pling their crops.

He al­so said there have been re­ports of ve­hi­cles be­ing dam­aged along the Bar­rack­pore Main Road be­cause of bi­son.

“Now, there has been a loss of life,” he said.

Ma­haraj said he plans to raise the is­sue at the cor­po­ra­tion’s up­com­ing re­gion­al co­or­di­nat­ing meet­ing, where all min­istries li­aise with the cor­po­ra­tions, in the hope of ad­dress­ing the is­sue.