Drone, Drone of Our Own

Context: Easing the restrictions on unmanned aerial systems (UAS) or drones in India is necessary for its growth and support to ‘Make in India’.

Pros of Drones: Drones can reduce costs of compliance, provide high-quality information (including areas difficult to extract data from, such as hilly terrain) and enable real-time monitoring. 

Lagging Drone Industry in India:

• Huge Market, Low Manufacturing: India is the fifth-largest importer of drones indicating the presence of demand beyond the military. 

• Recognizing the demand: The ban on the operation of drones in 2014 did not deter individuals from buying recreational drones from the shadow market. 

• there are over six lakh unregulated drones of various capacities in operation.

• Restrictive regulatory regime: The notification of drone regulations in 2019 provided not much improvement over the ban.

Cons of Restrictions on drones:

• Black-marketing: selling it at marked-up prices 

• Permit-oriented restrictions: “No Permission No Take-off” (NPNT) clause, that requires all drone manufacturers to have an NPNT software add-on on their drones. 

• ‘Digital sky’ platform, not operational yet, leaves no other way to operate UAS legally.

• Hardware regulatory compliance: The regulator lacks the facilities to test and certify UAS thereby increasing the workload and red-tape in the process.

• India’s loss: No other country has mandated such specifications. This reduces the market for India and the competitiveness of Indian manufacturers.

• Perpetuates a vicious cycle: whereby it dries up funds for R&D and stifles the already burdened domestic UAS industry. 

Way Forward:

• Upgrading the digital sky platform: it should be fed with back-end data to grant automated permissions.

• Phased manufacturing plans: as a tool to encourage international drone manufacturers to ‘Make in India’.

• Reduced tariffs: Encourage manufacturers to assemble semi-knocked-down drone units through incentives.