Mumbai: When bird flu first struck India two months ago, Javed Alam pasted several large newspaper advertisements to the walls of his butcher's shop announcing that cooked chicken and eggs were still safe to eat. It didn't help.
"Most of my regular customers have just walked past my shop," he said, at his meat counter in a busy north Mumbai market.
"I have waited for two months now. I can't continue like this for long."
Bird flu delivered a massive blow to India's poultry trade when it first broke out in mid-February. Authorities launched a massive culling of poultry and a clean-up drive, after which they claimed the outbreak was contained.
Sales began to pick up, until the disease struck again.
Two more outbreaks have been reported, the latest on Tuesday in Maharashtra, the site of two earlier outbreaks, and in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh.
"There were some signs of recovery, but the latest outbreak has proved disastrous," said Bharat Tandon, chairman of the Compound Livestock Feed Manufacturers' Association of India, one of the industry's main lobby groups.
"It is a major, major crisis. Chicken sales are down by 60 percent and the industry is losing Rs2 billion (Dh65 million) every day."
Government appeals, advertisement campaigns and even press conferences by chicken-munching politicians and officials have not helped wean people back to poultry.
Chicken is a staple for meat-eaters in India, where beef and pork are not eaten by many for religious reasons or quality concerns.
India has culled almost half a million birds and plans to kill 250,000 more.
About 1.5 million eggs have been destroyed, thousands of people checked for bird flu and hundreds of villages sanitised. No human infections have been reported.
But nothing, not even free offers, seem to draw chicken-eaters.
In the eastern state of West Bengal, sales are so poor that poultry traders have been organising free rice-and-chicken curry lunches to spread awareness about the safety of cooked chicken.
Scores of mostly poor and homeless people ate those lunches, but regular customers stayed away.
Other poultry farms and outlets have launched "buy one, get one free" campaigns or given away free eggs to regular customers.
Chicken prices in most parts of India have halved.
Exports have also been hit. The Poultry Federation of India says orders worth Rs4 billion (Dh130 million) have been cancelled since the first outbreak.
