When Indian war drones beat Pakistan & Co.

Startups have boomed in the changing geopolitics and strong Atmanirbhar push. This momentum could enable India to become a worldwide hub for drone manufacturing, increasing exports and creating high-tech employment opportunities, feels Sai Pattabiram, Founder & MD, Zuppa Geo Navigation Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

- Sunil Rajguru

Can you discuss the details of your participation in Operation Sindoor and how it helped to give India a military edge?

Our Ajeet Mini Drones were used for enhancement of localised situational awareness by surveillance patrols. Ajeet Mini is a fully designed and manufactured in India Micro drone that is the equivalent of the famous Chinese DJI drone that was being used by frontline Army units for what is known as “Over The Hill Situational Awareness”.

These drones in backpacks apart from being the foot soldiers go to tool for enhanced situational awareness are designed on a “Transformer” concept that covers a weight range from the smallest at around 1 kg to the largest at around 4 kgs.

Post Operation Sindoor, apart from the exponential increase in enquiries for India’s only DJI China equivalent drones ZUPPA is witnessing a huge jump in demand for its NavGati Autopilot given that it is India’s only secure drone flight controller which the Indian Army can use to introduce Cyber Secure swarming capabilities in its existing drone inventories immediately.

Wherever you see, there are military drones. Be it the Russia-Ukraine or Israel-Iran conflicts. Are drones now firmly the future of warfare? How will we stay one step ahead of our enemies?

All recent conflicts be it Russia-Ukraine or Israeli-Hamas or the Houthi’s have turned out to be Electronic Centric wars where the focus has been to gain a strategic advantage both tactically by interfering or accessing the control and communication systems of the adversaries equipment by exploiting vulnerabilities in the software/code layers of the equipment's Cyber Physical Stack (CPS).This has been the case because of the fact that these wars for the very first time witnessed large scale deployment of drones and allied electronic centric equipment.