Drones saving cost of land mapping for government by at least 75%, says Aarav Unmanned Systems CEO

Aarav Unmanned Systems' Vipul Singh

While pointing out that there are gaps in handling of the huge amount of data generated through various applications of drones in government projects, Aarav Unmanned Systems (AUS) CEO Vipul Singh said that there was a need to ensure that it is stored and safeguarded properly.

The nine-year-old drone company will start work on the Union government's land digitisation scheme, SVAMITVA, across several several states such as Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and so on.

Singh said that the data that is being generated for land records was being exchanged with the help of hard disks and physical servers. As a result, the scope of data traceability - who is moving the data, where it is being stored and so on - was very limited. "People know that there is a problem, people know that there is a solution required, but implementation of it is slightly slow," he said.

"Only the Land Records Department is dealing with this data. However, the data is useful for so many other applications. So have we able to ascertain the true value of this data - by say, monetising it? No, because the data is not centralised! Are we securing the transaction of the data? Can I access your land records? I should not be! It should be with the government and the landowner. So solutions like encryption, Blockchain, cloud infrastructure, and so on need to be implemented," Singh said.

In an exclusive interaction with Moneycontrol, Singh talked about the benefits of drones in taking up land digitisation, the complexities around it and so on. In the future, Singh is planning to take AUS' drone solutions to other countries, and also look to raise funds to scale up its operations.

Singh also highlighted the massive shortage of chipsets which has been extending the time needed for manufacturing a drone, apart from raising operational costs. Pandemic and other issues in Taiwan, the country from where these chipsets are majorly sourced, have played its part in the shortage. Now, not just AUS, but also other drone manufacturers have to buy chipsets from secondary stockists and pay three times the amount for procuring them, and for ultimately using it in their drones.

Aarav Unmanned Systems originated from IIT Kanpur in 2013 and is headquartered in Bengaluru. Its website says that is backed by firms and individuals such as GrowX, 500 Startups, StartupXseed, 3one4 capital, Valpro, Mr. Ashok Atluri (Zen technologies) and Mr. Sanjay Jesrani (GoNorth ventures) and others.

Excerpts from the interview:

Why is there a need for digitisation of land records and how are drones helping in the SVAMTIVA scheme?

So the the scheme covers only the digitisation of residential areas and not rural areas. And there is a reason to it. In our land records data set, which exists for rural areas, if you pick up any one map, you will find that there is no information available for residential areas. And there is also a reason for that, because these maps were earlier developed by Britishers. And Britishers were not bothered about where people live but were just bothered about how much area they can cultivate upon. And they used to collect taxes in proportion to that. So now, these are the maps which keep getting updated. Hence for the rural residential areas, there are no records.

Now, families have been expanding and naturally there has been lots of land division and amalgamation-related disputes. And the court is basically dependent on the local patwaris, who has the knowledge of the villages and of the families. However, the issues never get settled. These disputes continue for couple of decades and still don't get resolved and generations lose their value and time and life into these disputes.

So, through SVAMITVA,  when you create this land record linked to your Aadhaar with proper measurement of all your boundaries (mapped with drones, where your coordinates of your boundary exist in global coordinate system, nothing is disputable; and the accuracy is also at 10 centimeters. With drones you can see both boundary data as well as visual data from the top. All the local features things around there also identifiable. So, anyone who goes on your land can actually identify where the land ends.

And this also gets digitally linked to your Aadhaar card. So, if the authorised person feeds your Aadhaar card, he knows what properties you own and when.

So drones are being used because they can do this job better faster and in a more undisputable manner, where you don't have to go and measure manually and rely on that guy's judgment. Everything is very digital, evidential and non manipulative. You cannot manipulate that data right.

Where is AUS right now, in terms of progress of the project?

As a whole, already one lakh villages have been mapped out of over four lakh villages. As a company, we have mapped close to 25,000 pages every day with the help of 80 drones. We are mapping close to, I would say, anywhere between 150 and 200 villages every day across Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana. Manually, you can't even finish one village in a period of three days. And, financially, a drone costs only Rs 2,500 for surveying a village. Manually, it would have been at least Rs 10,000. So, we are talking about four times reduction in the cost of data collection.

What happens after this data is created with the help of drones?

The data is handed over to Survey of India. They make maps out of it. They take data from the state governments. There is a lot of ground verification done to validate what is correct what is not. Because the digitisation is being done through software but one needs to take approval of these landowners or property owners to validate the data. So, people go on the field, they check with every citizen and they take their approval with them and their neighbours that yes, you agree with these boundaries, and then it is basically frozen.

However, there are instances when landowners dispute over the boundaries. But people get cooperative and they resolve these issues amicably, because they don't want to lose the value that will come from this.

What are the complexities that you have faced while undertaking this project?

At the end of the day, it's a government machinery which is involved in administrating this project and executing it. There are a lot of inefficiencies around adoption of new technology. Procedures and standards are also not universal. For instance, a same project may be taken up differently in different places, which would lead to different outcomes. Standardisation is another area which really needs to be focused on. And there's next set of problems  around data sharing, storage, democratisation, value addition and so on.

How has been the transition from the previous UAS Rules regime to the current Drone Rules 2021 regime?

In the previous drone regime, no zones were defined. Everything you did, you needed plenty of permissions. It took the Survey of India two-three months to acquire permission for this project. But now, under the current regime, almost 90 percent of the country is defined as green zone. So, as long as you have a certified pilot and you have a drone which is approved or certified by DGCA, and it has met airworthiness requirement you can fly in 90 percent of the country.

How do you navigate through red and yellow zones while taking up the SVATIMVA scheme?

Whenever this happens an intimation is made to Survey of India and through their administration, they inform the local bodies and get the required exemptions.

From a wider perspective, what are the challenges facing the Indian drone industry today?

Today there is a demand and supply gap. If the market needs 10,000 drones, then there are only 2,000 available. So, there is a percent of the demand which is not being able to be met today by the Indian manufacturers. There are multiple reasons. First, the ecosystem was trapped by policy and funding related issues for a long time. Second, the issue is of global supply chain. There is huge chipset shortage which is affecting drone manufacturers, apart from automobile and other sectors. Earlier, if the time taken to develop a drone was 30 days, it is now extended to 90-120 days because of chipset shortages.

On top of this, we are having to pay three times the prices for these chipsets. Generally what happens is that most of these chipset manufacturing foundries, they have SLAs with large companies. So, once they are back in action, they will first honour their commitment to their long-term customers. So, the retail market like us who want to buy under 200 units will suffer and we then buy from secondary stockists where we have to pay three times the cost.

What next for AUS?

As a company, we don't only manufacture drone or do their operations, actually, we also do sector specific data analytics on the drone data. Our next step is to be able to help organisations and people understand the value of this data set by deriving information from it.

Second, most of our analytics and solutions circulate around environmental, social and governance (ESG) and sustainability-related fundamentals. So, the next step would be to be able to deliver ESG and sustainability related fundamentals as value ads to people on this dataset.

Third, the mainstream infrastructure sector has not yet really picked up drone at this scale. For instance, for development of roads and development of fiber network, there is not yet enough awareness about the applications of drones. We would like to create more awareness on this.