Drone Sector Needs More Support For India To Become A Global Hub

With an eye on 2030, the Indian Government (GoI) has repeatedly over the last year emphasised that the country aspires to be a global drone hub and have a USD 30 billion drone industry by the end of the decade.    

Steps like liberalised Drone Rules, 2021, rationalised norms for drone pilot, establishment of drone schools, and the Product Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme launched in 2021 to boost manufacturing in the drone industry were notedly great steps by the Centre to encourage the drone ecosystem in the recent years. They opened up avenues for growth and use cases including drone deliveries, land mapping for surveys, agricultural purposes, mining, surveillance, and defence.

The Union Budget 2023-24 also gave a small fillip to drone manufacturing in the country by allocating Rs 33 crore for the drone industry under Production Linked Incentive Scheme (PLI).

"Indian Drone industry is growing at a fast pace and ready to take forefront in the Global drone market. Rs 33 crore in PLI Scheme is a great step towards promoting the industry and we hope there will be much more in the coming days seeing the huge potential of Indian drone companies,” said Bodhisattwa Sanghapriya, founder and CEO, IG Drones.

As per NITI Aayog’s estimate, the drone market is expected to grow to USD 50 billion in next 15 years in India but for this to happen greater impetus needs to be given to the drone ecosystem from the perspectives of manufacturing, services and policy.

“While there is a significant amount of R&D and manufacturing to be done, there is also going to be a significant amount of solution development, or rather in the conventional terms, services, which is going to happen. So, one thing which we were anticipating (from the drone industry point of view) was that the PLI benefit, which is there today for manufacturing, could have been extended towards services as well as that would have led to direct employability or employment creation for the youth – both in the urban and rural population,” said Vipul Singh, Co-founder and CEO, AEREO (formerly known as Aarav Unmanned Systems), during a post-budget panel discussion with BW Businessworld.

Another aspect that needs to be looked at is dearth of qualified drone pilots and Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle (UAV) engineers in the Indian drone ecosystem. Late last year, a NASSCOM report pointed out that the number of Remote Pilot Training Organisations (RPTO) in the country were insufficient to cater to growing demands of the industry. “We acknowledge that announcements in Union Budget 2022-23 have been made on drone skilling courses proposed to be offered in select Industrial Training Institutes (ITI) in all states13, but we understand that they are yet to be started,” noted the report.

A report by EY-FICCI from last year recommends creation of a dedicated fund to provide Grants for research in drone-enabled technologies and policies, deployment through incubation centers for growth of indigenous drone related IPs and startups and funding (via fund of funds) to scale the share of Indian ecosystem across drone technology and manufacturing value chain.