Hyderabad-based drone spraying players draw up expansion plans

Two Hyderabad-based drone spraying companies, which have recently got Type Certification from DCGA, have firmed up plans to expand to reach out to more farmers

Hyderabad: Two city-based drone spraying companies, which have recently got Type Certification from the DCGA, have firmed up plans to expand to reach out to more farmers.

Pradeep Palelli, C-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Thanos, said the company has started gathering orders from customers who have been waiting for the certification.

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“We will be expanding our product facility as well as our product service and training teams over the coming months to cater to the demand that is going to come in. We expect there to be more than 1,000 drones in operation in the coming year. The number is likely to increase many fold in the next three years,” he said.

DGCA certification is given following rigorous testing of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in various NABL accredited testing labs. The UAV goes through a series of material, environmental, operational tests for safe, secured and reliable operations.

According to him, Thanos is one of the few companies in India that design and build drones locally. “We may be importing a few components and raw material but our drone designs are done from the ground-up by our in-house design team . The air frames are made at our facility in Hyderabad where we use computer numerical control (CNC) machines to process the raw material to come out with the drones,” he said.

“We plan to shortly expand our product capacity of 100-150 drones per month,” said Pradeep, adding that many agri-drone companies in India reassemble completely knocked down (CKD) or semi knocked down (SKD) versions imported from China.

The technology is widely accepted by the farmers given its benefits including improved efficiency or reduced spraying time, efficient usage of chemicals, and inputs. The drones come handy in dealing with labour shortage. Ofcourse, there are challenges relating to shortage of skilled manpower to operate drones, incorrect or ineffective spraying by unskilled/untrained drone operators in some cases. “These issues will be solved soon as drone training courses have started to pick up pace. These are being offered by drone manufacturers (like us) and agrochemical companies,” said Pradeep.

“The market is too big for any one company to address the need. More companies are expected to join but the end beneficiaries will be the farmers. With our Syena- H10, we expect to make a reasonable contribution towards easing the plight of farmers,” he said.

Another city-based drone manufacturer, Marut Drones, also got the DGCA Type Certification for its AG 365, its multi-utility agriculture medium category drone recently.

It has been tested in about 1.5 lakh acre across ten States in India, said Prem Kumar Vislawath, Founder, Marut Drones.

Marut also got the remote pilot training organization (RPTO) approval, which enables training and capacity building of drone pilots focussed on safe agriculture operations, repair and maintenance. It is tying up with universities to enable drone pilots.

“Manual spraying in agriculture has caused huge negative health impacts on operators. Repetition of these sprays exposes operators to chemicals and leads to cancers. Spraying drones can create new job opportunities for youth,” he said.