U’khand rescue to sanitisation: Drone industry flies high amid pandemic

In the last one year of lockdown, I witnessed many companies and industries losing business and shutting down their plants. But the same year transformed our company. We grew from a start-up to number one in the drone market.

Based in Chennai, we initially faced the difficulty that all the southern companies had. We were rejected by clients in north India but it was our work during the pandemic that gave us visibility across the country. We were initially called by officials in Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital to sanitise the campus using drones.

After our initial success, we were called by administrators in Raichur to spray sanitisers across the city to control the spread of COVID-19. From then on, there was no looking back for us as in the last one year we have bagged more than 100 government projects, including a project to spray sanitiser in Varanasi, the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Our projects vary from spraying sanitiser across an entire city to inside a building, metro stations, bus stands and many more. After we were done, the number of COVID cases did not increase and the doubling period of the virus was more.

Following the success in sanitising, we were hired to spray pesticides for crops. Using drones to spray pesticides made the work much faster as it could cover 40 to 50 acres per day.

During the recent locust attack, the government gave us the entire project of spraying pesticides. Even after the pandemic ends, our service in the agriculture sector will continue.

Seeing our work, we were called by the National Disaster Response Force (NDFR) to demonstrate our services in their headquarters in Delhi on Republic Day and we were the first private company to be deployed during the rescue operations in the recent ice burst in Uttarakhand.

In the past year, we have gained huge corporate giants like Reliance, TATA and many others to inspect their industrial plants using drones. As the government has tightened the norms of inspection, manual inspection might take several hours but drones are much more time-saving and economical.

Overall, in the past year, we have expanded our business from Chennai to 26 cities across the country and grew from having just 20 employees to over 400. Our fleet of drones, too, has expanded from around 20 in the beginning of 2020 to over 300 in 2021. According to the demand, we could expand our fleet up to 1,000 drones.

(as told to Yazhiniyan)