Every monsoon, the same battle plays out across Gujarat’s cities: health workers on foot, torch in hand, hunting for the puddles, rooftops and rubbish piles where mosquitoes breed — while the insects hide in places no ground team can reach. A small startup from Mehsana has taken the hunt to the sky.
Prime UAV Pvt. Ltd, founded in 2019 by Pradeep Patel, has built an Advanced Larval Source Management system that sends AI-powered drones over neighbourhoods to find the concealed breeding sites of the mosquitoes that spread malaria, filariasis and dengue. The drones scan stagnant water, rooftops, high-rise buildings and debris-filled spaces, and beam the precise locations of breeding sites to field teams on the company’s mobile app — so spraying and clean-up can be aimed exactly where the mosquitoes are, instead of everywhere at once.
A drone at work over a water body in Gandhinagar during the city’s anti-mosquito drive. (Image: TV9 Gujarati)
Six districts, one sky-high survey
The system is already at work in partnership with the Gujarat government across six districts — Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Junagadh, Anand and Mehsana. The company says its drones identified more than 3,500 mosquito breeding sites within the Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation limits between July and August alone, and it is now working with the Ahmedabad and Surat municipal corporations as well as teams in Rajkot and Indore.
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What the drone sees: a rooftop piled with old tyres, a classic mosquito breeding ground. (Image: The Blunt Times)
The world came to look
On 21 October 2026, a 17-member delegation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the India Health Fund, an initiative of Tata Trusts, came to Gujarat to review the model, joined by nine senior officials from central institutions including the Indian Council of Medical Research, along with Gujarat government representatives. The team assessed the technology’s field-level implementation and operational viability, exploring how the model could be replicated in other countries facing the same mosquito-borne diseases.
From farm fields to flood rescue
Prime UAV began with agricultural drones before turning its aircraft to public health during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the research behind the mosquito system began in 2021 — in step with India’s ambition to eliminate malaria by 2030. The same fleet has flown flood-rescue missions, including in Dholka in July 2026, and works on seed-ball dispersal for forests and locust surveillance. Patel, an MTech in mechanical engineering with 15 years of experience and eight in the drone sector, has collected 78 national and international aeromodelling awards along the way.
A mosquito that never hatches is a case of malaria or dengue that never happens — and from a small town in Gujarat, Prime UAV is showing how Indian engineering can take that fight to places no one on foot could ever reach.
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