Maharashtra’s Public Works Department on Friday clarified that there were not 3,19,400 rats in the state secretariat. The PWD secretary issued a clarification a day after Eknath Khadse, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Maharashtra minister, questioned how a pest control company killed that many rats in Mantralaya in just seven days.

“As a pest control exercise, the PWD Ministry issued two tenders to control/kill rodents in Mantralaya and Annexe building,” the Maharashtra PWD secretary said on Friday. “According to the contract, 3,19,400 anti-rodent tablets were provided. It never meant that 3,19,400 rodents were killed.”

Khasdse brought up the matter in the Legislative Assembly on Thursday. “A survey found that there were 3,19,400 rats in Mantralaya,” Khadse said. “A work order was issued by the General Administration Department. The company was given six months, but it claimed to have killed them in just seven days.”

The BJP leader had also said that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation had killed only six lakh rats in two years across Mumbai.

In its clarification, the Maharashtra PWD also said that the anti-rodent tablets were “supplied at a rate of Rs 1.5 each, which means that Rs 4,79,100 was spent in total”. “In 2010-’11 and 2011-’12, these tablets were purchased at the same rate,” the PWD secretary added.