Bhubaneswar: The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) will be using drones to disinfect market places from Wednesday.
The civic body on Tuesday released a weekly plan for spray of disinfectants using drones at market places in North Zone.
“All operations to be executed after the scheduled market hours preferably after 9 PM,” the notification added.
The BMC in collaboration with the Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited (BSCL), has deployed two drones for the purpose. The Drone-I, a spraying type, can undertake 25 minutes of flying with one battery and covers 1.5 km areas with 7.5 litre of disinfectants. This is exclusively used to sanitize the targeted areas falling under the jurisdiction of the BMC. The Drone-2 is for public announcement and surveillance. It has one battery and 25 minute of flying time. It is being used to make public announcement to mitigate the risk due to public gathering. It can also be used for community awareness and deployed to accompany the spraying drone for better and effective spraying and mitigating unforeseen risk during night time involving any citizen movement.
In a trial sanitation drive, the civic body had used drones for spraying disinfectants along the stretch from Raj Mahal Square to Sishu Bhavan Square on April 14. Later from April 15 to 22, the drones were engaged to spray disinfectant in 17 major market places/haats across the city. They were Unit I Daily Market, Unit II Market Building, Indradhanu Daily Market, Ruchika Daily Market, Saheed Nagar Daily Market, Maa Kochilei Daily Market, Unit III Daily Market, Unit IV Daily Market, Nageswar Tangi Daily Market, Old Town Daily Market, BJB Nagar Daily Market, Bapuji Nagar Kiosks, Damana Haat, VSS Nagar Daily Market, Gandamunda Daily Market, Siripur Daily Market and Kapilaprasad Weekly Market.
