Drones should be made wholly in India for the sake of our security
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It is a good thing that the government is thinking of giving a big boost to indigenous production of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, to fill Indian skies with hundreds of thousands of these flying objects.
The term ‘drone’ evokes qualities such as lazy and boring. Drones are anything but.
They are too versatile to be dull, with uses that range from military surveillance, delivery of payloads and even kamikaze strikes to serving as roving cameras for movie-makers, helping the police keep watch, aiding urban traffic flows, surveying rural fields for soil moisture, pestilence and crop maturity, spraying protective chemicals, delivering life-savers to remote areas, assessing the impact of nature’s fury, and even making aesthetic formations in the sky to dazzle us. But is sufficient attention being paid to localization of various components of the extensive infrastructure we will need to manage heavy drone traffic, complete with real-time identification and tracking (RIT), and the ability to disable drones deemed to be bent on mischief? India’s vote-on-account this year had promised ₹57 crore for drones, but the budget for 2024-25 was silent on the subject.
Now, a sizeable corpus of ₹3,000 crore is reported to be under hot consideration for production-linked incentives aimed at three sub-sectors: drone R&D, design and components, and manufacture. The Ukraine War has focused attention on the use of drones in warfare, as new uses have been discovered and deployed over the last two years.
Ukrainian soldiers, particularly snipers, have been sending up first-person-view drones to track the motion of potential attackers and targets. Drones loaded with bombs are being flown into enemy
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