With global militaries adopting unmanned systems for layered combat operations in modern warfare, India is trying to catch up with other countries to scale up production of different kinds of drones to become future ready as the multi-front threat environment around India persists.
Ukraine, which has mastered the art to exploit different formats of unmanned systems technology to sustain war for years against the military might of Russia, reportedly produces over 20,000 drones per day and is aiming to take the production to 7 million this year.
Similarly, Russia reportedly produces somewhere between 1,500 to 2,500 drones per day while the number is believed to be much more in case of China, which does not share information regarding its military affairs.
Iran too demonstrated its unmanned platform capability, with its Shaheed kamikaze drones drawing global attention, in the war with the US and Israel. They, as per international reports, have a continuous supply chain and have an inventory of 10,000 of different types of drones.
In India, drone industry is trying to ramp up production capacity to meet the urgency of this shift senior Indian military leadership has repeatedly underscored but need orders to sustain manufacturing.
Zen Technologies CMD Ashok Atluri stated that his company has introduced a new interceptor drone. The production capacity is 15,000 per month on three shifts which can be scaled if required, he added.
Likewise, IG Defence said it is accelerating preparedness for a future defined not just by firepower, but by scale, speed, and technological adaptability. It’s now rolling out 200 First-Person View (FPV) drones per day.
Bhubaneswar-based BonV Aero’s co-founder and CEO Satyabrata Satapathy said that they have the capacity to supply 300 drones per month.
Sai Pattabiram, founder of Chennai-based Zuppa Geo Navigation Technologies, informed that they can deliver over 12,000 drones per year now, which works out to 1000 drones per month, but the military, according to him, needs to move on with Request for Proposals so that orders for industry increases exponentially.
Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi recently emphasised the need for 8,000–10,000 UAVs per corps, including FPV units, to effectively dominate contested airspace along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and Line of Control (LoC) -- the borders with China and Pakistan respectively.
Earlier, former Army Chief General M.M. Naravane had said that future conflicts could require up to 40,000 drones a month.
Drone war
Operation Sindoor was the first drone war for India where Pakistan used hundreds of cheap drones for ISR, kamikaze roles and tried to exhaust expensive counter responses from New Delhi.
India responded -- both kinetically as well as non-kinetically -- with precision, purpose and in an integrated manner.
However, post Ops Sindoor escalation, Indian Army has acquired different categories of indigenous drones to the tune of over ₹5,000 crore, including loitering munitions, kamikaze, and surveillance aerial platforms.
More are in the pipeline. For instance, the Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) drone programme, expected to be worth somewhere between ₹25,000 to ₹30,000 crore, is entering into RFQ proposal stage. Tri-services will acquire 87-97 MALE drones, while the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) late last December cleared a large-scale procurement of loiter munition systems for artillery regiments which is valued at Loiter ₹79,000 crore.
Unlike conventional defence systems that require long development cycles and significant capital investment, drones represent a new category of agile, high-value, cost-effective force multipliers.
Drones in modern warfare now go far beyond precision strikes and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), they are being employed for electronic warfare (EW), communication relay, swarm attacks, logistics and supply, battle damage assessment, artillery spotting and fire correction, mine detection and clearance, air defence support, naval warfare, urban combat support, psychological warfare, target designation, training and simulation, autonomous hunter-killer operations and counter-drone operations.
Published on May 8, 2026