Rajkot Municipal Corporation (RMC) drones have flagged 4,731 spots where mosquitoes could breed, after surveying 59.39 sq km of the city. Field staff had treated 1,340 of them by September 25, and the drones themselves had logged just over 40 hours of insecticide spraying, IANS reported citing the civic body.
The survey so far covers five wards the corporation classes as high-risk: 11, 18, 3, 4 and 13. That is a little over a third of RMC’s 161.85 sq km area.
How the programme works
RMC launched the drone project in late August. According to ETV Bharat Gujarat’s report on the launch, the corporation first built a digital map on an AI platform to mark likely breeding zones. Drones then photograph those zones, and each image goes onto Google Maps with its GPS coordinates. The system assigns tasks to ground teams and drone operators, and supervisors can track the work online.
The drones matter most where health workers cannot walk in: stretches of the Aji river, pits and ditches, dumping sites, abandoned buildings, open tanks and thick vegetation. Municipal Commissioner Tushar Sumera made that point at the launch, ETV Bharat reported. The corporation also said it would take legal action against industrial units and housing societies that ignore clean-up warnings.
The gap between finding and fixing
The numbers show a backlog. Crews have reached about 28% of the sites the drones found, so roughly 3,400 flagged locations still await spraying or source reduction. Mapping also runs ahead of treatment on area: about 100 sq km of the city has not been surveyed yet.
Door-to-door work continues alongside. In the week of September 17 to 23, RMC teams carried out larvicide work in 1,50,172 houses, fogged 933 houses, inspected 409 non-residential premises and served 312 notices on homes and 92 on commercial properties, according to the civic body’s figures carried by IANS. A separate water-borne disease survey that week covered 3,04,556 people.
Why the timing matters
The southwest monsoon has started withdrawing from Gujarat, and the weeks after the rains typically bring the peak of dengue, as standing water in pits, tyres and construction sites turns into breeding ground. Ahmedabad shows what that looks like: the city logged 496 dengue cases in the first 20 days of September, more than in all of August.
RMC has not published comparable dengue figures for Rajkot this month alongside the drone update, so it is too early to judge whether the survey is curbing cases. The corporation’s own metric is sites found and sites treated.
What Rajkot residents can do
- Check your own premises first. Water tanks without lids, coolers, flower pots, old tyres and terrace puddles account for much of the breeding that drones cannot see from above.
- If your ward is among the five being surveyed, expect RMC teams to follow up on flagged spots nearby. Notices are going out to both homes and businesses.
- Housing societies near the Aji riverbed or open plots can report stagnant water to RMC so it gets added to the treatment list.
What to watch
Two things will show whether the project scales: how fast the corporation closes the gap between 4,731 flagged sites and the 1,340 treated, and whether the survey moves beyond the five high-risk wards to the rest of the city before the post-monsoon season ends. Weekly case data from RMC would make it possible to measure the effect.
Sources: IANS (via Social News XYZ), ETV Bharat Gujarat, DeshGujarat
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.