Locust swarm splits into two; fourth district in state gets hit
ADVISORY Orange, mango orchard owners asked to use noise, smoke to drive away insects
The locust swarm that entered Maharashtra earlier this week made its way to Bhandara on Wednesday, making it the fourth district to be affected.
After pesticide was sprayed at Katol tehsil in Nagpur between Monday night and Tuesday morning, the swarm split into two groups; one moving towards Parseoni in Nagpur while the other entered Bhandara, said officials.
At 10pm Wednesday, officials from the agricultural department were able to trace the movement of the locust swarm to Temani village, Tumsar taluka in Bhandara. “The swarm travelled over 100km on Wednesday from Andhalgaon, Mohadi taluka back into Ramtek tehsil in Nagpur, and again into Tumsar Bhandara. They have settled at orchards surrounding Temani where we will carry out overnight insecticide spraying drive to kill majority of the population,” said Ravindra Bhosale, divisional joint director agriculture.
“The original distribution of the main 10-km-long and 2-kmwide swarm has reduced. We are facing trouble estimating exact numbers or current length of the swarms without satellite data since they move very fast,” said Bhosale.
The state agriculture department issued a ‘locust warning alert’ for all 11 districts in Vidarbha and four districts in north Maharashtra — Nandurbar, Dhule, Nashik and Jalgaon, said officials. A similar advisory was issued by the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) agromet division for Vidarbha. “Largescale damage to fruit orchards is being expected across affected districts, and farmers need to take care,” said an IMD official.
The Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) estimates the swarms can be as many as 40 to 80 million. However, the Locust Warning Organisation (LWO) said the escaping population that entered Maharashtra would not be more than 5 million.
Along with five other states, Maharashtra is witnessing a surge of rapidly reproducing pests that fly up to 150km a day and has the potential to impact food production.
The swarm has invaded farmlands and fruit orchards across two talukas in Amravati, one in Wardha, and four in Nagpur till Wednesday morning.
So far, control operations have
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