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DRDO To Focus On Medium Altitude Long Endurance UAV Development

2008-05-30 The DRDO has sent out Expressions of Interest (EoIs) to several private sector companies, including the Tata Group, L&T and Godrej & Boyce, for manufacturing Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAVs, which will be developed by the DRDO. These MALE UAVs will fly at tens of thousands of feet, watching a target for more than 24 hours continuously.

There are several firsts in the MALE UAV programme. It will be the first aeronautical programme in which the DRDO will partner a private company; since independence, public sector giant, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), has monopolised this sector.

This will also be the first time a production agency (the private company that wins the contract to manufacture the UAVs) will work with the DRDO right through the development process, so that the production run can begin without any hitches.

Significant as those landmarks are, the most interesting part of the MALE UAV programme is the decision-making process, which the DRDO has adopted, in consultation with the military. This was revealed to Business Standard in a series of interviews with top DRDO scientists.

In deciding on India's fleet of unmanned aircraft, the DRDO and the military first zeroed in on UAVs that no country would sell. They agreed to develop micro-UAVs, which a soldier can carry on his back and quickly launch; and also complex Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs), which carry full weapon-loads to strike aerial and ground targets.

A greater dilemma was over mid-sized UAVs; countries like Israel are eager to sell India MALE UAVs. But eventually, says DRDO Chief Controller of Aeronautics and Materials Sciences, Dipankar Banerjee, it was decided to develop, rather than buy, MALE UAVs for two main reasons.

Firstly, the large number of UAVs the military requires creates a powerful commercial logic for a private company to manufacture them. And secondly, the DRDO feared that import of MALE UAVs might be blocked.

Banerjee explains, "We have to see what is possible under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which bans the transfer of technology and products with more than 300 kilometres range and 500 kilograms payload

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