National mission to push for domestic manufacturing of drone components

New Delhi: With Chinese components being used extensively in drones made in India, the Union government is set to incentivise domestic manufacturers to make such components, besides encouraging R&D programmes to design and develop high-end unmanned aerial vehicles, a top government official said here on Friday.

“We will soon launch a national drone shakti mission to incentivise the manufacturers for producing the components as we aim to achieve technological sovereignty. Our manufacturers should not only assemble the imported parts,” Ajay Sood, Principal Scientific Advisor said at a briefing.

To be run by the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the national mission might go to the Union Cabinet soon for approval, sources told DH.

In 2021, the Union government released a new set of rules for drones, decreasing the paperwork and costs involved in owning, manufacturing, and operating drones. The rules gave a push to the indigenous industry having over 100 manufacturers and more than 200 service providers.

A big challenge for Indian manufacturers is to overcome the dominance of Chinese components like semiconductors, magnets and batteries. The communist country dominates the global supply chain of the drone industry, triggering security concerns.

The Indian armed forces, one of the biggest buyers of UAV and counter-UAV systems, is in the process of putting a stringent system in place to check Chinese signatures in the products they are buying from Indian manufacturers.

There have been instances in the past when the government cancelled contracts signed with Indian drone companies, after finding Chinese parts in their products.

A critical second part of the national drone shakti mission will be to encourage the academic institutions to kick start research programmes on high-end components like flight controllers and cameras needed for drones used in strategic sectors.

“This programme will be administered by the Anusandhan National Research Foundation and address the gap areas in drone research,” Sood said.

The Principal Scientific Advisor spoke at a media interaction, where Union Science Minister Jitedra Singh and secretaries of four scientific departments briefed the media on last year’s highlights.

Singh said the Research Development and Innovation fund of Rs one lakh crore, for directly supporting private sector R&D was an unprecedented step."Complementing this, ANRF has been established to democratise research funding, expand participation beyond elite institutions and mobilise nearly 50–60% of its resources from non-government sources including philanthropy and industry," he added.