India's Indigenous Drone Program Set To Gain Momentum As Armed Forces Seeks To Procure 97 'Made In India' Long Endurance UAVs

In a significant development for India's indigenous drone development program, Indian Armed Forces are looking to procure 97 'Made-in-India', Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE).

The drones will be used to do conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions over both, the land and sea borders.

These drones, will be apart from the 46 Israeili Heron drones acquired by the three services over the years, and will be all made in India by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

According to a report by ANI, these 97 drones are estimated to cost around Rs 10,000 crore, and the Indian Air Force will be lead service for procurement, since the IAF is procuring the largest quantity of drones from the three services.

This comes after the Indian government announced a deal to acquire 31 MQ-9B Sea and Sky Guardian high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) armed drones from the United States, sixteen of which will be used for patrolling the land borders opposite Pakistan and China.

The rest 15 will be used by the Indian Navy, to patrol the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).

It is, however, unclear that which Made-in-India drone will be acquired since the ANI report claims the endurance of drones being procured to be more than 30 hours.

India does not have any MALE drones capable of a maximum endurance of 30 hours.

The DRDO-designed Tapas BH-201 drone is reportedly capable of flying for only 18 hours. The only other drone that can meet the requirement of more than 30 hours of endurance appears to be an entirely new clean-sheet drone under development, called Archer-NG, which has not yet conducted its first flight.

Apart from the procurement of Make-in-India drones, the ANI report also talks about the upgradation of the existing drones in the Armed Forces fleet with original equipment manufacturers, that will be conducted by HAL.

This upgradation program could presumably be Project Cheetah, under which India is working to weaponise all Israeli drones in the Indian fleet for over Rs 3,000 crore.

(Also Read: India's Homegrown Drone Programme Struggles To Take Flight, Two Decades After First Drone Imports)