Cuttack: The Cuttack Municipal Corporation (CMC) soon plans to use drones to improve solid waste management programme in the city.

On Thursday, a team of experts from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur made a presentation to the CMC on the use of low altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in improving solid waste management system. The professors of the IIT said that with the use of drones equipped with hyperspectral imaging and analytics facility, the CMC can tackle sanitation issue, which is a perennial problem of the city, in a more effective and planned manner.

According to the experts, the hyperspectral imaging can provide information on the location where the garbage is disposed, type and quantity of garbage so that measures can be taken immediately to clean them. A control room will be put in place from where the drones can be monitored.

"The CMC suffers from shortages of manpower, and in such circumstances, drones can make things easier for us. Presently, we have to rely on verbal versions of the supervisors about the area cleaned or amount of garbage removed from various places. But by using the images of drone we can get a clear picture and check corruption to some extent," said a senior CMC official.

The CMC officials said they were happy with the presentation and have plans to implement the proposal. "The project has not been implemented anywhere in the country. IIT Kharagpur has assured us to provide technical and software support for implementing the project. The project will be discussed in detail in the council meeting of the CMC," said CMC commissioner, Gyana Das.

Das said they will soon have another round of discussion with the experts. "We will also try to convince some corporate firms to provide us funds under the corporate social responsibility programme for the project," said Das.



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