India Is Planning To Set Up An Incubation Fund For Drone Industry

Mumbai, NFAPost: India is going ahead with its plan to form an incubation fund for the drone industry as part of efforts to make the country reduce its dependency in drone manufacturing.

The government decision comes in the wake of India’s push to decrease Chinese imports after a military offensive in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley. Now China has a monopoly in drome CKD kits as it is assembled here and put software layer for furhter upgradation.

In a report published by Business Standard states that DJI Drones, a Chinese company, has near-monopoly in the domestic drone industry. “The fund being conceptualised by NITI Aayog will aim at bridging the gap between academia and industry so that the entire entire ecosystem of drone manufacturing improves in scale and size,” said a government official.

According to sources familar with the develop, the fund will be known as DISHA (Drone For Infra Security and Agriculture will give Indian startups and manufacturers who are ready to come up with new technologies in drone and unmanned vehicle development and manufacturing.

Besides applying it for home security by wat if surveillance, drone technology has successfully implemented in the recent locust attack in North India which attacked the Kharif crop.

Talking to NFAPost, Omnipresent Robotic Technologies Founder and CEO Akash Sinha said it is a decision in the right direction as country should have self sufficiency in drone technology.

“We have succussfully implmented drone technology in taking on the menace of locusts and we also participated in the mission. Now we should come up with more drone manufacturing facilities across India as its application in defence, homeland security and agriculture is growing like anything,” said Akash Sinha.

Already NITI Ayog has identified development of unmanned aerial vehicle as one of the focus areas in its vision statement and wanted capacity building initiatives in this regard.

Sources said that Min­istry of Civil Avi­a­tion, which will launch the ini­tia­tive, will ap­proach public sec­tor banks to man­age the fund. The idea of the fund is to make it eas­ier for var­i­ous drone start-up in­cu­ba­tors to ac­cess fund­ing. The gov­ern­ment is also part­ner­ing pre­mier uni­ver­si­ties to find new so­lu­tions in drone tech­nol­ogy.

In India, big cor­po­rates have al­ready evinced in­ter­est in in­vest­ing in this space, Re­liance Group has recently too sake in Ateria Aerospace, a drone tech­nol­ogy com­pany with man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

The Drone Fed­er­a­tion of In­dia, a re­cently formed lobby group of drone man­u­fac­tur­ers, said there is a need for the gov­ern­ment to pro­mote re­search in the sec­tor. “To en­cour­age de­vel­op­ment of tech­nol­ogy, au­tho­rised per­sons may use test­ing ar­eas for con­duct­ing re­search, test­ing, and de­vel­op­ment of elec­tron­ics,” the fed­er­a­tion said in its sugges­tions to the gov­ern­ment.