Telangana uses drone seed bombers

In the first of its kind, officials of the Telangana state Forest Development corporation sprinkled the seeds in Forest with the help of 'Drone' in the reserve forest area Chengicherla, Medchal Malkajigiri District.

As part of forests development, Telangana forest has taken this initiative under 'Beejayan' programme by using the technology of the drone seed bomber. The seed bombing was conducted with the support of Sankalptaru organization.

The drone seed bomber which was used for Beejayan program is called 'Jugni' which was founded by one Mr Umesh from Rajasthan.

The seed bomber has the capacity to carry the seeds about 600 grams and cover the area about 2.5-KM radius at a time.

Additional PCCF K.Chandrashekar Reddy IFS has trailed the programme on Tuesday at Reserve Forest Lalgadi Malakpet, Medchal Malkajigiri Dist and seed bombing with different varieties of species.

Mr Raghuveer IFS, VC & MD who launched the Beejayan program in Medchal district told the News meter, "This technology was first used in Uttarakhand state and the main objective of seed bomber drone is to plant the trees in the toughest of the terrain in India".

Senior forest officials believe that, seed bombing with drone help in afforestation given the favourable situations even if five percent of the seeds germinate to become trees, its success. And this method is recognised an inexpensive way to broadcast seeds".

With the aim of afforestation in the forests that has suffered massive deforestation, a host of technologies and concepts has been introduced in the marked and the newest one being drones that are launched to spray seed fields from the sky.

Seed bombing technique is called spray seeding or aerial reforestation which involves a plane or drone dropping thousands of 'seed bombs'. These seed bombs are balls of clay and earth packed with seeds inside. In this method a variety of seeds can be packed into a single ball.