-The Indian Express Locust attack tracker: The locust menace also hit Andhra Pradesh. In Tamil Nadu too, swarms of a locust species attacked banana, rubber and other crops in some districts. With India battling the worst desert locust outbreak in three decades, the insects have now damaged crops in five states — Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra — with the Centre issuing a warning to 12 states. With Locusts devastating...

-Hindustan Times “It was a small swarm, and spread across 1km-by-1km,” Suwa Lal Jat, joint director of plant protection in Rajasthan’s agriculture department said on Monday. Jaipur: A new swarm of Locusts entered Rajasthan’s Jaisalmer on Sunday, officials said Monday. This is the fifth swarm to enter the state in four days from its western border with Pakistan. Since the first locust swarm invaded the state’s Sriganganagar district from Pakistan’s Baluchistan on April...

In the midst of COVID-19 lockdown, desert locust swarms have been seen in parts of Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh in the second half of May 2020. The recent attacks by desert locust swarms have caused massive crop damage, depletion in the stock of cattle fodder and destruction of green vegetation in these states. As on 25th May, 2020, over half of Rajasthan’s 33 districts were...

-The Hindu Haryana professor writes to Union, State agriculture Ministers reharding issue Gurugram: Prof. Rajinder Chaudhary, Advisor, Kudarti Kheti Abhiyan, Haryana has expressed disappointment over the fact that despite the known side-effects of aerial spraying of pesticides, the government’s locust control policy was focussed only on chemical spray. He said they completly ignored non-chemical measures. In a letter to the agriculture Ministers and agriculture secretaries of the Centre and Haryana, Prof. Chaudhary said a...

-Hindustan Times The Locust Warning Organisation (LWO) sprayed Malathion 96 and Chlorpyrifos, both organophosphate pesticides, to control the locust swarms across states. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations said on Friday that it may declare the locust invasion a plague if it takes a turn for the worse after breeding by the voracious, crop-crunching insects in India, Pakistan and West Africa. FAO now categorises the locust invasion that has...