GUNTUR: With the onset of the monsoon season, GMC has initiated a series of contingency measures to combat and mitigate the impact of seasonal diseases. As a part of this, the officials have prepared a special action plan to address the challenges presented by the monsoon season and to prevent the spread of seasonal diseases.
The malaria division of GMC has divided all 57 divisions in the city into 22 sanitary divisions. As part of it, a door-to-door survey will be conducted to identify the stagnation of water near households and observe the implementation of Dry-Day every Friday, and necessary action would be taken to prevent the stagnation of water in vacant areas.
According to the decided schedule, vehicle-mounted fogging and hand-operated fogging will be done across the city. Special activity is being implemented in the areas which reported malaria cases in the past few years. Sanitation workers have been deployed to conduct regular cleaning and unclogging operations across the cities to minimise the risk of water stagnation and subsequent disease outbreaks. Gambusia fish are released in the stagnant water to control larvae.
The primary objective is to prevent the outbreak of water-borne and vector-borne diseases and extra attention is being paid in the areas where the positive cases were reported, said Guntur Municipal Corporation Commissioner Kirthi Chekuri. However, untidy vacant lands with stagnant water and overgrown plants are causing severe inconvenience to the residents.
According to official reports, over 12,000 vacant lands are present in the city which are left unattended for years. Observing this, GMC has instructed the land owners to take up cleaning activities and issued orders to levy additional taxes on such ignorant owners, however, the results are not as expected.
Speaking to TNIE, K Ramana, a resident of AT Agraharam, said that the vacant land beside our apartment has remained filled with stagnant water and unwanted bushes, which have turned into breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
“When the civic body gave clear instructions and set up a notice board on the vacant land beside our apartment, the landowner did take up a cleaning drive and removed all overgrown plants, and levelled the land with sand to prevent water stagnation. But after a few months, the bushes have overgrown and the situation is same now,” he added.
Measures to control mosquito menace