Delivery/logistics, urban air mobility can uplift India’s drone ecosystem

Smart technology of drone delivers coronavirus vaccine (Source: ShutterStock)

Drones or unmanned aircraft systems are used in India for a variety of purposes, but only for activities that are within visual line of sight. Once the government allows activities that are beyond the visual line of sight, the scope of drone usage can expand to the delivery of vaccines and medicines and ferrying people.

In February this year, the Board of Control for Cricket in India was given permission to use drones for live aerial filming of matches.

Companies such as NTPC inspect some of their power generation plants using drones. In agriculture, drones are used to spray pesticides.

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Even the government has uses for drones, apart from deploying them for defence purposes.

State governments want to deploy drones to deliver COVID-19 vaccines to people living in remote areas and some states are looking at using them to distribute medicines to the needy. Telangana and Maharashtra are likely to be the first states to start using drones for delivering vaccines.

In April last year, the Central government started the Svamitva scheme, where villagers get their properties mapped by drones and geotagged and downloaded on phones.

“We have seen the government’s pet project, the Svamitva scheme, that is going to impact the lives of millions across 6.6 lakh villages, where drones are playing a key role,” said Smit Shah, director of the Drone Federation of India, explaining the range of functions of drones. “They are also used for land records and construction inspection. In defence, they are used for homeland security and other defence purposes.”

Satyendra Pandey, managing partner of AT-TV, an aviation advisory firm, said that on the commercial front, delivery of goods via drones has been tried and tested across countries.

“China has used drones for transporting medical equipment to contagious areas with minimal risk. In the US, several companies have experimented with home delivery using drones,” Pandey said. “Certain initiatives in Africa have also used drones for delivery of medical supplies.”

Pandey said that drones are also finding growing use in photography and for mapping, and the list of possibilities keeps expanding. Spanish police has used drones with loudspeakers attached to warn residents to stay at home, he said.

In India, drones are used extensively for military purposes, Pandey said.

“It is now established that India first used military-grade drones during the Kargil War in 1999. Since then, there has been extensive development work undertaken by India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation,” Pandey said.

He added that more recently, drones were used during the avalanche in Northern Siachen (2016), the Bandipur forest fires (2019), the Bihar floods (2019), the Pulwama attack (2019) and in the coronavirus outbreak (2020).

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“On the recreational front, drones are also gaining traction. Anecdotally, it is cinema – as opposed to technology forums – that helped familiarise many with what a drone looks like,” he said.

According to Ankit Kumar, managing partner at management consulting firm Alternative Global India, “Delivery/logistics and urban air mobility are two segments of very high importance when it comes to making India a drone hub. These two verticals have immense potential to uplift the entire drone ecosystem.”

Kumar said that as of now, the regulations only allow visual line of sight drone activities. The major uses to which drones are being put include surveying and inspection by government entities, public sector undertakings and private corporations in defined application verticals such as agriculture, land mapping, mining, telecom tower inspections and power line inspections.

“The true potential of drones will be unleashed once ‘extended visual line of sight’ and ‘beyond visual line of sight activities’ are permitted, on which the Ministry of Civil Aviation is currently working. Once BVLOS is enabled, drones can be used for delivering healthcare and other packages, inspecting of oil and gas pipelines and urban air mobility, enabling passenger movement in an intra-city environment,” he said.