Nagar Nigam Deploys Drone Didi for First Anti-Larva Spray Over Flooded Konia Ward

Varanasi Nagar Nigam on Sunday evening deployed a woman drone pilot—locally framed as Drone Didi—for what officials and Ward 68 corporator Amardev Yadav described as the municipal body’s first anti-larva spray over flooded pockets of Konia. The pilot named in the tip is Asha Devi, from the Harhua Block cohort of agriculture-trained women drone operators. The operation was reported around Monday, 7 September 2026.

Corporator Amardev Yadav said the flight was ordered as post-flood vector control in red-zone style pockets where standing water had sat after the river and rain spell. Claimed equipment figures attached to the briefing were a 10-litre payload, about fifteen minutes of battery endurance, and coverage of roughly one acre in ten minutes. Those numbers are attributed claims from the municipal–corporator wrap. They are not independently flight-logged in this report.

The district note around the same window put nine licensed women drone pilots on the agriculture-training books. Using one of them for a civic anti-larva run is the novelty the corporation is selling: a first municipal drone spray for larva control in a flooded ward, rather than only farm pesticide work.

Konia Ward 68 sits on the river-edge sanitation map that also carries a separate silt-and-stench complaint at Konia Ghat. This article stays on the spray flight. The ghat silt story is a sibling file, not a merge. Pairing them in one undifferentiated flood piece would blur two different civic actions.

Anti-larva work after monsoon flooding is standard public-health logic. Drone delivery is the method change. Ground fogging still matters for lanes and houses; aerial spray is aimed at open water sheets that crews cannot walk. Whether larva indices actually fall in Ward 68 after Sunday’s flight is the outcome measure this desk will need from health and municipal follow-ups—not the novelty of the airframe alone.

Asha Devi’s naming matters for the “Drone Didi” frame. The programme’s public face is a trained woman pilot, not an anonymous contractor. Corporator Amardev Yadav’s ownership of the ward-level request keeps political accountability inside Ward 68 rather than only at the commissioner desk.

Residents in flooded Konia pockets will judge the flight by bite counts and larval checks in the coming days. A fifteen-minute battery and a ten-litre tank are operational claims. Disease prevention is the public promise those claims are meant to serve.

Nagar Nigam’s Sunday drone anti-larva run over Konia Ward 68, with Asha Devi as the named Drone Didi and Amardev Yadav as the ward corporator on the record, is the city’s first claimed municipal use of that tool for vector control—payload and acreage figures included here strictly as attributed claims.