Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, on Friday instructed the state health officials to use flying drones for spraying anti-malarial medicines over vast areas in order to make the state disease-free within a year.

On the second day of the district collectors' conference, Naidu said that the state should be free from all communicable diseases in the next one year and for that, “You can use drones for application of anti-malaria spray, and data should be analysed to come up with many more innovative and preventive measures, based on the root causes of other diseases”. He stressed on the need of West Godavari and Visakhapatnam officials to be more active in reducing infant mortality. “We have a serious responsibility to save lives. We should do everything in our hands to do so”, he said.

Naidu instructed the officials to ensure that health records, birth and death certificates are made mandatory and stored in digital lockers, while emphasising that in treatment of patients needing dialysis, delays should be avoided. The chief minister asked the officials to coordinate and link the e-Pragati portal with the central government's digital locker policy. Principal Secretary Poonam Malakondaiah said that there has been an improvement of 2.68 percent in the health sector across all 13 districts, compared to the previous quarter.