Garhwa district, bordering Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, has been put on high alert for locusts after swarms of insects reached Jhansi, about 200km from here, fuelling serious concerns about them entering Jharkhand.

The district administration has asked people to alert officials if they spotted a swarm. “This is an emergency, and we need to remain vigilant,” deputy commissioner Harsh Mangla said on Monday.

Mangla has set up a district-level team with DDC Naman Priyesh Lakra as its nodal officer. He has asked agriculture department officials to take preventive steps to tackle the issue.

'The team is ready for any required operations,' Mangla said.

Scientist Ashok Kumar of Garhwa’s Krishi Vigyan Kendra said there was a real possibility that invading swarms of locusts from Madhya Pradesh’s Chhatarpur and Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh may move towards Jharkhand.

“The wind direction increases the chances of this happening,' he explained.

Desert locusts are a particularly resilient species of swarming short-horned grasshoppers, known to devour everything in their path. They pose unprecedented threat to food supply and livelihoods of millions of people.

'Farmers have been apprised of the issue. They have been advised to gather around and bang dhols, drums, tin boxes and thalis to create a racket and drive away the locusts,” said district agriculture officer Laxaman Oraon.

Oraon said they had also stocked up chlorpyrifos, a pesticide, to be sprayed to protect crops.

Locusts have been breeding 400 times the normal, which may prove catastrophic for various areas of Asia and Africa, according to a Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report.

“We expect the locusts to arrive in three to four days. We intend to stop it at the border and for this we have started spraying insecticides and have started awareness campaigns for the farmers,” sub-divisional officer of Garhwa Pradeep Kuma told newsfileonline.in.

Talking about the ways to control damage, Firoz Ahmed, a retired professor of Ranchi University’s zoology department, told the news website: “Apart from insecticides, which are being sprinkled aerially with the help of drones, farmers have several traditional ways to keep locusts at bay. Farmers burn effigies so that the smoke keeps away locusts. Loud noise and rain help curb their growth and spread.”