Across India's cities, the mosquito is winning a quiet evolutionary war — developing resistance to the very chemicals deployed against it, rendering decades of dengue-control strategy increasingly hollow. A 2026 study in Pune confirmed what a growing body of research has long suggested: Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are no longer reliably killed by permethrin, one of the country's standard insecticides, with survival rates in some neighborhoods approaching 40 percent. With nearly 300,000 dengue cases and 485 deaths recorded in India in 2023 alone, the failure of blanket chemical spraying is no long
Insecticide Resistance Forces India to Rethink Dengue Strategy Beyond Spraying
India reported 485 dengue deaths in 2023 and 289,235 cases; Maharashtra recorded 55 deaths and 19,034 cases that year; globally WHO reported 11,201 deaths from 14.4 million dengue cases in 2024.