NRK's...Chuck E. Cheese Wants You!

A monster pile of...?

Here's a question for you: what goes from two to better than 20 million in just three years? The worth of your stock portfolio? Not unless you are Warren Buffett. The temperature in Texas? maybe. No, the real answer is rats (eek). A pair of rats can have that many offspring in just three short years. If you can imagine what hundreds of pairs can do (rats do not ethically believe in family planning, apparently), well, then you will understand the need for the legion of NRK employees in places like Mumbai, India.
The Night Rat Killers are assigned specific areas of the rat-infested (some say the MOST infested city in the world) city with the task of killing as many of the 8-inch varmints as they can. Between January and July of this year, a total of 214, 848 rats went to the Great Cheese Hut in the Sky. Yes, that's a LOT of vermin. While it is true that poison and traps account for a portion of the DOAs, young men pad around at night either barefoot or in sandals and kill rats by the dozen by whacking them on the noggin with a pole.
In fact, there are quotas for the NRK's. Each must kill and bring in 90 rats in three days, or he does not get paid! Lest you think this potentially odious job goes begging for want to employees, it does not. Regularly, hundreds apply for the position, and the qualifications are more stringent than one might think.
1. Each prospective employee must have at least a 10-th grade education.
2. He (or she, I guess) must be between 18-30 years of age.
3. NRK's must be able to lift 110 pounds ( a bag o' rats?)
4. Each must pass a written test and undergo a videotaped examination of his or her skills as a rat killer.

Following all of that, qualified candidates are taken to a field and given 15 minutes to kill as many rats as possible. In one recent such contest, the winners each bagged 20 rodents to win a job skulking through the night in Mumbai, whacking rats over the head with a long, metal-tipped pole, after having transfixed the beast with the glare from a flashlight.
If all of this seems odd to you, think of the potential disaster rats could wreak in terms of diseases, especially in a port city like Mumbai where grain is a major import. Thus, it is necessary to keep the millions of rats at bay in order to maintain some degree of good health, especially in the poorer sections of the city near the harbor.
It's a long-standing tradition first begun by the British when they occupied India, and it will continue as long as there are rats to kill and money to be made doing it.
Sort of like a real-life whack-a-mole, I guess.