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Over 45,000 houses in Thiruvananthapuram join fight against mosquitoes
The Hindu
Dry-day challenge to control vector-borne diseases
The Thiruvananthapuram city Corporation’s dry day challenge on Sunday, as part of initiatives to control vector-borne diseases, has garnered an unexpected response with photos of mosquito-source destruction activities from more than 45,000 households getting uploaded in the Smart Trivandrum mobile application in a single day. Buoyed by the positive response, the civic body decided to extend the challenge to one more day. Unlike the dry day observances in the past, during which health officials from the ward-level provided data on the number of households in which the activities were carried out, the Corporation decided this year to make the people themselves mark themselves as being part of it. As part of this, city residents were asked to upload the photographs of destruction of mosquito sources from their households, with a geo-tagging system to get accurate location-wise data.![](/newspic/picid-1269750-20250217064624.jpg)
When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.