India’s drone industry may be gearing up for a major take-off, but several red flags remain. For scaling up commercial operations, drone startups say while a key challenge is the presence of a large number of red zones, another is a lack of certification such as for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) for mass deployment. Until such issues are addressed, they say, large-scale deployments for logistics, ecommerce and other sectors will remain limited.
Under the Drone Rules 2021, Indian airspace is divided into three zones. While green zones cover the largest area, there are 9,969 red zones where drone operations are restricted. The red zones include metro cities, military installations, government buildings and more.
