How 2025 Reshaped the Drone Sector and What 2026 Will Bring

In an interaction with Thiruamuthan, Assistant Editor at Industry Outlook, Agnishwar Jayaprakash, Founder & Director, Garuda Aerospace, discusses how India’s drone ecosystem shifted from hardware sales to service-led, data-driven models, supported by regulatory clarity, government demand, and partnerships. He emphasizes operational reliability, interoperability, and certification as decisive factors shaping scalability, investment confidence, and India’s global drone competitiveness into 2026 onward.

Agnishwar Jayaprakash is a drone technology entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience, specializing in UAV design, manufacturing, and deployment. His expertise spans aerospace engineering, agri-tech applications, defense drones, ecosystem building, and technology-driven social impact initiatives.

With 2025 seeing accelerated drone adoption across defence, agriculture, and infrastructure, what specific shifts most redefined India’s commercial deployment and revenue models?

India's drone ecosystem shifted from one-time equipment sales to ongoing service-based and data-driven activities in infrastructure, agriculture, and defense in 2025. Agricultural users (particularly under government programs like Drone Shakti) relied on pay-per-use models through cooperatives and FPOs, while the Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS) model became the predominant approach, with pricing linked to per-acre spraying, per-kilometer infrastructure mapping, or per-flight-hour surveillance rather than outright purchases, covering surveillance, predictive maintenance, and intelligence analytics.

As more industries incorporate DaaS into routine procurement, especially in logistics, warehouse operations, and smart-city monitoring, this shift is anticipated to intensify in 2026. Even if hardware volumes continue to climb, the majority of commercial drone income in India may come from service and data layers.

As regulatory frameworks stabilized in 2025, how did clearer Drone Rules reshape manufacturing localization, certification timelines, and investor risk appetite in India?

With the launch of the draft Civil Drone (Promotion and Regulation) Bill, 2025 and improvements to the Drone Rules 2021, the regulatory landscape stabilized in 2025, increasing the predictability of certification and compliance. A variety of policy-driven incentives, including the PLI and the reorganized Drone Shakti program, pushed OEMs to indigenize avionics, ground-control systems, and componentry in order to promote manufacturing localization. It is anticipated that the expected incentive under Drone Shakti will expedite capital expenditures into new facilities and component lines in 2026, greatly increasing domestic manufacturing capacity.

With scaling challenges becoming more visible last year, why did operational reliability, fleet uptime, and data integration overtake hardware innovation as sector bottlenecks?

The actual difficulty lies in guaranteeing dependability, uptime, and data integration at scale, as drone technology has become comparatively standardized. Robust backend software is now crucial due to DGCA requirements for flight logs and Digital Sky compliance. As a result, operational reliability, analytics integration, and maintenance effectiveness emerged as the new bottlenecks, compelling businesses to prioritize fleet preparedness and data management over hardware innovation. Spending on secure cloud analytics, AI-based predictive maintenance, and fleet management platforms is predicted to increase more quickly in 2026 than on basic airframes.

Also Read: The Role of Indigenization in Advancing India’s Drone Sector

Amid increased government procurement and pilot programs in 2025, how critical was public-sector demand in proving commercial repeatability for private drone operators?

In 2025, government and public sector initiatives had become the benchmark for drone operations' scalability and reproducibility. Drone-as-a-Service models found frequent use cases in defense surveillance, agricultural spraying, mining inspection, and infrastructure mapping. These initiatives, which were mandated by ministries like Defense, Agriculture, Civil Aviation, and Road Transport, produced formalized tender frameworks that established industry-wide operational standards, certification requirements, and safety protocols. State demand institutionalized DaaS as a viable commercial model for private companies while also validating drones as reliable operational equipment. Drone use in land records modernization, river linkage, logistical corridors, and disaster management is anticipated to increase in 2026 among federal and state authorities.

As market crowding intensified through 2025, how did partnerships between OEMs, software firms, and service providers evolve to improve execution efficiency and margins?

Ecosystem alliances became essential to maintaining profitability and operating efficiency as the market became more saturated through 2025. In order to provide ready-to-deploy packages that combine flight data, mission planning, and compliance reporting, drone OEMs are increasingly integrating with analytics and software companies. In order to increase utilization rates and save capital costs, service providers either leased fleets or used white-label revenue-sharing schemes.

Vertical-specific alliances, where manufacturers, software developers, and big EPCs or system integrators together bid for full-stack contracts that included mapping, analytics, and implementation, proliferated, particularly in mining, smart infrastructure, and agriculture. To guarantee pilot certification uniformity, training facilities and RPTOs are coordinated with particular OEMs. By combining resources, eliminating redundancies, and cooperatively handling regulatory requirements, these partnerships not only standardized operational quality but also reduced margins.

Also Read: Engineering Leadership Across India’s Mining & Infra Value Chain

Looking into 2026 as cross-sector integration deepens, which capability gaps—autonomy, certification, or system interoperability—will most influence India’s global drone competitiveness?

As 2026 approaches, system interoperability and certification maturity—rather than just autonomy—will likely determine India's competitiveness in the global market. Interoperability between UAVs, UTMs (Unmanned Traffic Management), and command systems is essential for scalable, multi-vendor operations as more ministries and private buyers use drones. India's strengths will decide its international traction in areas where export markets and defense partners want open APIs, standardized communication protocols, and secure data compatibility.

For quicker approvals and export preparedness, certification procedures must be in line with international safety and operational requirements. Reliability and policy-backed certification are the immediate facilitators of scale, but swarm control and BVLOS execution remain strategically significant. India's position as a global drone hub through 2026 and beyond will be shaped by companies that grasp certification speed, cross-system compatibility, and verifiable safety.