India banned Chinese drones. Army, CRPF, and BSF can’t stop using them

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:01)
India has been talking a lot about drones lately. Operation Sindur put military drones at the center of a national conversation, and the government said that it will spend $2 billion on combat drones. But long before any of this, in the forests of Chhattisgarh, India's security forces had already settled on the drone that they trusted the most. If there is a ground zero for drone warfare in India, it is in Chhattisgarh. Over the last five or six years, small quad-copters have flown ahead of patrols, scanning for ambushes before the troops move in. Officers say it has become standard procedure. If one crashed, another took its place, and the operation carried on. Now the thing is that these drones come from China. They are made by a company called DJI, which is short for Da-Jiang Innovations. And the same preference now runs through almost the entire security establishment in this country. The Ken found DJI drones in the hands of the Chhattisgarh police, the CRPF, the Border Security Force, the Indo-Tibetan Border Force and the Army from Kashmir to the Northeast of India. The Ken correspondent, Pratap Vikram Singh, spoke to at least half a dozen army and paramilitary officers, four DJI dealers across India, three Indian drone companies and multiple training centers that work with the security forces. And here is what he found out. The government actually banned these drones years ago.
Its own rules were written to keep Chinese hardware out of Indian security operations. But instead, an entire ecosystem has grown up to keep DJI flying. So today, we're going to look at why Indian soldiers keep reaching out for the one drone that their government asked them not to use.
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Nighda Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Friday, the 14th of August.
Let's start with why soldiers love this drone.
A Superintendent of Police in one of Chhattisgarh's Naxal-hit districts put it quite plainly to the Ken.
A constable with no technical background can fly a DJI drone with barely any training and come back with a usable report. The drone fits into a backpack. And Indian drones, by comparison, are bulkier and often need two people to carry and also take months to learn. So according to them, the performance is top-notch. DJI has spent years building consumer drones and it really shows. Its enterprise machines can stay in the air for up to an hour, fly in the rain, stream live video and switch between thermal and night vision. Neel Mehta, who founded Astiria Aerospace before Reliance bought it in 2019, told The Ken that nobody comes close to DJI in the small drone category. Their scale and their pricing, he said, are extremely hard to match. And pricing is where the story really turns. A DJI Enterprise drone with thermal and LIDAR sensors costs up to 10 lakh rupees including a maintenance contract. The closest Indian equivalent from Idea Forge runs 50-60 lakh rupees. And DJI's consumer variety Mavic, which is the everyday workhorse of a patrol, costs under 50,000 rupees. And this gap changes how a drone gets used. The same Superintendent of Police owns one Idea Forge drone and 10-12 DJIs. He said, when the Indian machine is that expensive, the pilot is afraid to fly it because a crash means being held responsible, and drones crash constantly. One supplier told the Ken that army units crash a drone almost every week. So a drone that you can afford to lose turns out to be the feature that matters the most in a war zone. But let me just remind you that this drone is still banned in India. So for something that is officially prohibited, DJI is remarkably easy to buy here. The loophole is emergency procurement. Big military platforms go through central tenders, but a DJI drone is cheap enough for a local unit to buy directly when the need is urgent. That is how the fleet has spread. The CRPF alone has around 700 drones, and more than half of them are DJI.
Two officials told the Ken that the Border Security Force or BSF flies an even larger DJI fleet.
And this brings us to the harder question. If these drones are banned, how do tens of thousands of them reach India every year?
More on that in the next segment.
The answer is a supply chain that is built to root around the ban. Dealers told the Ken that DJI drones come in through Southeast Asia, the UAE and Nepal. Resellers in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Dubai buy the drones and then move them by air, sea or road into India. Between 2019 and 2023, Chinese drone exports to the United States, for example, collapsed while imports from Malaysia jumped, which is a sign that Malaysia had become a trans-shipment stop.