The word most Karachi households use for this problem is deemak, and the phrase they use on the phone is "deemak ka spray karwana hai." Here is the difficulty with that sentence, and it is the reason this page exists: what a caller means by deemak spray is almost always a surface application, and a surface application cannot reach a subterranean colony living in soil. The termites you can see on the skirting are workers at the end of a supply line; the colony that sent them, often Coptotermes heimi with hundreds of thousands of workers, is underground, sometimes outside your boundary wall entirely. Spraying the visible end of the supply line kills the workers you can see and leaves the colony untouched.
So the everyday vocabulary maps onto the wrong product. This hub translates the Roman-Urdu terms people actually search, deemak ka ilaj, deemak spray, deemak proofing, deemak ka permanent ilaj, into the four treatments that actually exist, with the honest outcome of each. For the wider multi-pest vocabulary, our Urdu–English pest glossary covers every pest; this page goes deep on deemak alone.
Deemak ki alamat kya hain? (What are the signs?)
Four signs settle most cases. Mud tubes (mitti ki surangein): pencil-width earthen tunnels climbing a wall or pillar, the signature of subterranean termites commuting between soil and wood. Hollow wood: a door frame or skirting that sounds papery when tapped, because deemak eats from the inside out and leaves the paint shell intact. Swarming winged termites (parwane) after rain: an emergence of reproductives, usually in monsoon. And bubbling or rippling paint over wood or even walls, where galleries run just under the surface.
One caution on the swarm: winged deemak after the first monsoon rain is the colony's reproductive event, not the damage itself, and its absence proves nothing. The seasonal mechanics are covered in our after-monsoon termite guide. Karachi's dominant species and their field ID are on the drywood vs subterranean explainer, and the biology of the city's second major species has its own page: Heterotermes indicola.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does "deemak spray" actually buy?+
A surface spray of visible galleries and infested wood. It kills the workers present, suppresses visible activity for weeks to months, and does not touch the soil colony. We will say this against our own interest in both directions. First: a cheap spray round can look completely successful while leaving the colony intact, which is exactly why the same houses get re-sprayed every year by the same low-priced operators; the recurring bill is the business model. Second: sometimes suppression is genuinely all you need, and we say so. A tenant leaving in six months, infested loose furniture that can be treated as furniture, a boundary-wall tube with no structural contact: none of these justify a full barrier, and a firm that quotes one for them is over-selling. What a spray can never honestly be sold as is deemak ka permanent ilaj, because permanence lives in the soil, not on the surface.
Deemak kaise khatam karein (دیمک کا علاج)? The four real treatments
One: post-construction soil treatment (drilling and injection). Holes drilled at the wall–floor junction around the affected structure, non-repellent termiticide injected to form a continuous treated zone in the soil beneath. Termites tunnel through it, carry the dose home, and the colony's pressure on the building collapses. This is the standing answer to an active infestation in a built house.
Two: pre-construction proofing (deemak proofing). The same soil chemistry applied while a building is under construction, before floors go down, which is why it costs a fraction of retrofitting. If you are building in Karachi, this is the single highest-leverage termite decision you will ever make. The full staging is on the termite proofing pillar.
Three: baiting systems. In-ground stations that workers feed on and carry back, eliminating the colony slowly over weeks to months. Slower than liquid treatment, valuable where drilling is impossible or where the colony source is inaccessible. The honest trade-offs between the two are set out in liquid treatment vs bait stations.
Four: wood treatment. Direct injection and preservative treatment of infested timber, the right tool for lakri mein deemak when the problem genuinely lives in the wood itself, as with drywood-type species in furniture and roof timbers, and a supporting tool otherwise.
Which of the four fits is a species and access question, not a price question, and it is settled by inspection. The decision logic sits on our termite control overview.
Ghar mein deemak ho to pehla qadam kya hai?
Do not disturb the evidence. The instinct is to break open the mud tubes and spray household insecticide into them; both make professional diagnosis harder. Broken tubes tell the colony its route is compromised, and repellent household sprays scatter foraging into new, unmapped routes through the same wall. Leave the tubes intact, photograph them, note every room where you have seen activity, and have the inspection done on undisturbed sign. An inspection maps where the colony is entering; a panic spray erases the map.
Kya deemak wapas aa jati hai? (Does it come back?)
After a surface spray: routinely, because the colony was never treated. After a correct soil treatment: the treated envelope keeps foraging out of the structure for as long as the chemical bond holds, backed in our case by a written warranty rather than a verbal promise. "Wapas aa gayi" stories almost always decode to one of three things: a spray sold as a treatment, a barrier installed with gaps, or new construction work that cut through a good barrier and was never re-treated. All three are avoidable, and only one of them is the termites' doing.
Deemak treatment ka rate kya hai?
Every current figure, per square foot bands, worked examples, and what changes the price, lives on one page: the termite treatment cost guide. We keep prices in one place deliberately so that no page on this site quotes a stale number. What we will say here is structural: a quote dramatically below the market bands is usually pricing a spray, not a treatment, and the difference is exactly the difference this page exists to explain.
Kya deemak ka desi totka kaam karta hai?
Partially, and only at furniture scale. Sun-drying infested furniture (dhoop lagana) genuinely stresses drywood-type infestations in loose items, and kerosene or neem oil on a small piece kills workers it contacts. None of it reaches a soil colony, and none of it protects the structure the furniture sits in. Home remedies are furniture first aid, not building treatment; use them for a chair, not for a house.
The recurring Karachi version of this mistake is diesel or used engine oil brushed onto the lower walls of a storeroom. It stains the plaster permanently, the vapour lingers for weeks in a closed godown, and the colony simply forages around the treated patch, because oil on a wall does nothing to soil under a floor. We have re-treated houses where years of totkas cost more in repainting and replaced timber than the soil treatment that eventually fixed the problem would have cost on day one.
If the signs above match what you are seeing at home, an inspection settles the species, the entry points, and which of the four treatments, if any, the situation actually justifies. That last clause is the promise this page was built on.
Saad Danish is a co-founder and director of Nest Fumigation Services Private Limited, a licensed pest-control and fumigation company based in DHA Phase 4, Karachi. He oversees the company's administration, client services, and marketing, working alongside NFS's technical team to deliver residential and commercial pest management across Karachi — from termite proofing and general pest control to HACCP and Sindh Food Authority compliance programmes for food, warehouse, and industrial clients. Nest Fumigation Services is ISO 9001:2015 certified and a member of the SPMA (Sindh Pest Management Association), PPMA, and the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
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