As the drone regulations kick off from December 1, the industry players and the government bodies are getting prepared for a whole new set of use cases that the drones or unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAV) are going to unleash in the coming months. In a conversation with Business Today, Jayant Sinha, minister of state for civil aviation, talked about three such use cases that the task force set up by the ministry of civil aviation (MoCA) is currently exploring. The task force includes people from industry, academia and air force.

The minister said that one use case is the organ transport, for which the government has received a lot of requests from people. Sinha said that the government is considering the idea to allow drone operations within the cities for organ transport since it's a life-threatening area. "We might allow it within a city, where you will have certified drone ports. A hospital can have a certified drone port on its roof; another hospital can have another certified port, and then we create the drone corridors that will enable the drone to vertically take off, get into the drone corridor, operate in the drone corridor, and then land in the next drone port, and carry the organ, so that we don't have to set up green corridor to transport organs," he said. Companies across the world are already experimenting with this idea. Zipline in Rwanda, for instance, is working on a similar model with medical supplies and organ transport.

Sinha said the second use case that the task force is looking at is the surveillance in urban and rural areas, which includes terrain mapping. For instance, an industrial set up may want to assess the conditions of remote locations like towers, chimneys etc. The third use case is to be able to do agricultural application. "For example, you go over a field and do fertiliser application. What kind of regulations do we need for people to create a drone fleet, and for [a farmer] to fertilise [his farms]? These are draft regulations. But to be able to enable these kinds of use cases, we are coming up with an entirely new set of ideas such as bi-modal control, air corridors, and drone ports," the minister says.

Sinha said that the drone policy is largely divided into three parts with the use cases mentioned above likely to be a part of the second phase of regulations, for which the draft regulations will be out for public consultations by mid-January 2019. In the third phase of regulations, he said that concepts like flying taxis and delivery of goods to consumers by e-commerce players like Amazon is likely to be considered.

MoCA has already received interests from other countries like Israel, France and the US to collaborate with Indian authorities in establishing the drone regulations in India. "India has a unique set of issues that other countries are less concerned about. For us, security and population density are unique," Sinha says.

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