Indian drone players are preparing a strong foothold in Asian state intelligence operations
India and China have been the two key players who have been highlighted often for running state-sponsored warfare. And, these countries are extensively producing and supplying drones for military warfare as well.
India both domestically and internationally has been dealing in surveillance drones. For instance, Armenia, a landlocked country in Western Asia, signed a contract with India over the purchase of drones and other weapons produced in India.
Initially, India used international player like Israeli- based NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware as tool when Pakistan accused the Indian government of spying on Imran Khan by using this spyware.
Recently, Israeli state-owned defence company won a contract of Indian Ministry of defence for supplying 67 surveillance drone to the army. Sources said the drones will have all-terrain capability and can fly above an altitude of 500 metres, making them suitable for operations along the Indo-Pak border.
But now Indian private players are also coming in the race of manufacturing surveillance drones. Listed below are the key Indian companies dealing in military drones:-
(1)Ideaforge
Ideaforge is a Mumbai based drone manufacturing company with 20+ patents & 240000+ successful missions, designs & manufactures mapping and surveillance applications drones. Idea Forge is India’s largest manufacturer of drones for Defence, homeland security and industrial applications. Its product focuses on UAV systems. It has been developing drone solutions for a variety of applications. This organization is had a licensed from the manufacturer of UAVs approved by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
(2)Asteria
Asteria offers security and surveillance specific products and solutions, including flagship hardware and software as well as an integrative platform. Their drones provide intelligence gathering services for various critical sectors including the army, the military and the police forces to generate insights from real-time data, images and videos. These solutions are developed and designed to meet tailored requirements, so that you can do more. Its surveillance drone technology provides actionable intelligence from aerial data.
(3)Drone-lab
Dronelab technologies were founded in 2016 by Nikhil Methiya in Gujarat, India. It provides various industrial applications like Surveying & Mapping for industries like Construction and Agriculture
It has developed unique applications platform using cutting edge tools that integrates automated flight planning app, UAV agnostic cloud platform, machine learning and AI to automate drone applications and become one of the pioneer organization to develop drone applications in India.
(4) Aero360
Aero360 is the Chennai based fastest emerging company in the area of drone solutions that provides High-Performance Autonomous Drones for Surveillance, Monitoring, and Industrial Survey & Inspections.
They manufacturer most demanding applications in India including Land surveying, pipeline monitoring, precision agriculture, conducting Search & Rescue operations and to carry out Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR) missions faster, thus saving time, money and lives.
The current warfare ecosystem and evolving drone technology suggest that the key private leaders who have pioneered are they to stay and will be seen as close state partners in executing various strategic operations.
