Hyderabad: Targeting areas with the most mosquito menace, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation’s Entomology Department is undertaking large-scale anti-mosquito operations to mitigate vector-borne diseases. The entomology team used drone-based anti-larval operations over lakes to tackle the mosquito menace.

According to the GHMC, accessing all parts of lakes was becoming difficult and water hyacinth was the major obstacle during the manual exercise. Due to challenges faced, the drones are being used to spray larvicides. Drones can spray chemicals at the rate of one acre in ten minutes, thereby reaching remote and humanly unreachable spots.

The drones are being used in the lakes including at Shah Hatim Lake, Balakpur Nala, Musi River and Katora Houz under the Karwan constituency where these lakes and water bodies are known for mosquito breeding sites. Karwan MLA Kausar Mohiuddin said that earlier, workers had to clean the lake and spray the chemicals manually; sometimes they had to get down knee-deep into the water, which is too risky. They are also susceptible to diseases and skin infection due to water pollution.

“In response to numerous complaints from residents about the mosquito problem, I took the initiative to request the GHMC Commissioner, RV Karnan, to approve a drone-based anti-larval operation in these lakes. This operation has been carefully planned over the past few days to effectively address the issue,” stated Kausar Mohiuddin.

Additionally, several complaints were registered online and offline with GHMC’s entomology wing regarding the increase in mosquitoes menace as people are having sleeping nights due to the buzzing of mosquitoes. They pointed out that the Sanitation Department is not cleaning the garbage on time, which has also led to the mosquito menace.

Meanwhile, the GHMC recently has come up with a new digital feature ‘fogging on request’ in ‘My GHMC’ app to help the citizens in learning more about mosquito menace.

Any citizen of Greater Hyderabad who is facing mosquito menace can login in my GHMC mobile app and request for fogging. This request will be received by an assistant entomologist and assigned to the area fogging worker. Once the request is attended by fogging in that area it gets resolved by uploading a photo with geo location.