GAUHATI Authorities in northeastern India are offering farmers cash for every rat they kill because an explosion in the rat population is threatening to devastate crops and plunge the region into famine, officials said yesterday. Farmers will be paid two rupees (3p) for every tail brought in to government offices.

The scheme is the latest devised to deal with the rapid increase in the rat population caused by a rare flowering of wild bamboos, which bloom for about four years, and then not for another fifty. When the flowers die, the rats move on in search of other foods.

The last time the plant, known locally as the muli bamboo (Melocanna baccifera), flowered in 1959, it sparked a famine that led to a violent, three-decade rebellion by local tribes. The current flowering began in 2004 and is expected to last until next year.

In recent years the Government has contained the rat population by handing out tonnes of rat poison and paying farmers to make traps. The army has even been called in to kill rats.

Experts from around the world have grasped the opportunity to study the bamboo to determine why it flowers so irregularly.

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