As crop-damaging locusts swarm northern India, authorities have been advising farmers on ways to safeguard their crops from the insects. Farmers have been asked to create a racket using drums, utensils and even mobile disc jockeys to to prevent attacks by locust swarms, known to devour everything in their path. A video showing a farmer’s jugaad or creative hack to keep locusts away is now going massively viral on social media.
Rahul Srivastav, a superintendent of police in in Uttar Pradesh’s Jhansi district, took to Twitter this morning to share a video of the jugaad that has already collected a whopping 26 million views on TikTok. Jugaad is a Hindi word used to signify creativity in making the best out of scanty resources and is celebrated as an example of the Indian spirit of resourcefulness and enterprise.
Mr Srivastava praised the invention shown in the TikTok video while sharing it on the microblogging platform and wrote: “Locust is the mother of inventions”. He also added the hashtags #Jugad and #JugadRocks, among others.
The invention shows an ‘airplane’ mounted on a long pole in the middle of a field. The ‘airplane’, created out of moving fan blades, a plastic bottle, a can and a cardboard tail, is seen rotating atop the pole and making a loud noise that would keep the locusts away. Take a look:
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