Opinion
Drones should be made wholly in India for the sake of our security
Summary
- The success of production linked incentives aimed at creating an Indian ecosystem for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) should be judged by how sharply the indigenization of its technology and supply chain reduces the danger of drone misuse.
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.
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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 formations.
Novel uses are being found in Israel’s war in Gaza as well—to devastating effect. Indian policymakers have taken note and want to end dependence on China for drones and their components. This makes sense.
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What makes less sense is frittering away funds on anything other than the development of local capability in every link of the ecosystem’s supply chain: motors, sensors, cameras, videography equipment, propellers, batteries, navigation and communication systems, airframes and the advanced electronics that underlie each part and integrate them all into a functional whole. Drone design should be part of manufacturing R&D.
Testing is a good capability to have, but not foolproof. Complex software embedded in different chunks of inter- operative electronics inside a drone might hide vulnerabilities that enable a hacker to hijack or disable it.
It is unlikely that the testing capacity needed to detect these can come about without the ability to make everything that drones and their control mechanisms use as inputs.
An enlarged outlay could fund a bunch of startups to develop, from scratch, every single assembly and component that goes into drones and the rest of this ecosystem, be it traffic management, RIT or aerial policing. The aim should be to dispense with imported microprocessors that have anything but the most elementary pre-programming.
Let these startups draw upon Indian talent at engineering colleges, whose own projects could be funded too. Drone making could then easily be incentivized to use locally developed tech and components.
Also read: Ukraine bets on long-range drones as it seeks a battlefield edge
It will reduce the risk of finding our skies buzzing with flying objects whose control may slip into the wrong hands. Since the electronics that go into drones also underpin advancements in other sectors, such as EVs, supporting drone R&D could have a variety of positive spillover effects.
