Consider the following activities:
- 1.Spraying pesticides on a crop field
- 2.Inspecting the craters of active volcanoes
- 3.Collecting breath samples from spouting whales for DNA analysis
At the present level of technology, which of the above activities can be successfully carried out by using drones?
Answer & explanation
Answer: (d) 1, 2 and 3
All three jobs can be done with drones: farm drones spray pesticides, drones fly over volcano craters to take images and gas readings where people cannot go safely, and drones hover over surfacing whales to catch the breath they blow out. The last sample is then used for DNA analysis.
- ✓ 1. Drone spraying of pesticides is an approved farm use in India. The Agriculture Ministry issued a Standard Operating Procedure for it in December 2021.
- ✓ 2. A drone flew over Alaska's Makushin volcano, beyond its pilots' sight, to capture images and detect volcanic gases. Such flights make monitoring hazardous volcanoes safer.
- ✓ 3. Researchers fly drones over surfacing whales to collect the breath (blow) on a petri dish. Genes sequenced from such samples show the whale's microbial community.
Remember · Drones now do dull, dirty and dangerous jobs: spraying farms, sampling volcano gases and collecting whale breath.
Sources
- PIB, Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (21 Dec 2021), SOP for use of drones in pesticide application ↗ “Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for use of Drone in Pesticide Application for Crop Protection and for spraying Soil and Crop Nutrients”
- NASA, Volcano-observing drone flights open door to routine hazard monitoring ↗ “With flights to Makushin Volcano in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in September 2021, a group of federal scientists and industry engineers demonstrated the UAS could successfully fly without its pilots’ eyes on the aircraft.”
- NOAA Fisheries, Giving North Atlantic right whales a check-up using advanced technology ↗ “collect breath, or “blow,” samples using drones. The drone flies over a surfacing whale and collects the air and “snot” exhaled through the blowhole onto a petri dish.”
- Extensive core microbiome in drone-captured whale blow supports a framework for health monitoring (PubMed Central) ↗ “Bacterial and archaeal small-subunit rRNA genes were amplified and sequenced from blow samples, including many of sparse volume, as well as seawater and other controls, to characterize the associated microbial community.”
Question and answer: UPSC's official GS Paper I (2020, Series A) — paper ↗ · answer key ↗. Explanation: Minimalist IAS, checked 30 Sept 2026 (how we verify). ·