Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: India’s drone industry has a huge problem. It’s a story that repeats itself ad nauseam every time you walk into a drone manufacturing unit’s shop floor: imported circuit boards, foreign firmware, and overseas processors. Don’t be taken in by all the fancy work that the startups and the OEMs and the engineers tell you that their drones can do. They can do all that, but it’s all built on things which India imports. The airframe may carry a Made in India label. The intelligence inside it often does not.
NIDAR 2.0, launched earlier this month by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in collaboration with the Drone Federation of India, is a significant step toward filling this gap.
Raising the stakes
While the first edition – held in March 2025 – asked 3,448 students from 109 cities and 22 states to look at building autonomous drones for disaster relief and precision agriculture, NIDAR 2.0 raises the stakes considerably. This time, the teams are being challenged to design indigenous flight controllers and autopilot systems built around the VEGA processor – the homegrown microprocessor developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under MeitY’s Microprocessor Development Programme, based on the open-standard RISC-V architecture. The message is pointed: India should not just operate drones. It should own their brains.
NIDAR 2.0 is a two-pronged format for India to get on top of the drone ecosystem. Firstly, Drone Innovation Teams are tasked with developing fully autonomous swarm drones capable of locating survivors and delivering medical supplies in disaster zones without external communication. They are also tasked with developing GPS-denied drones for indoor industrial inspection. Component innovation teams are being asked to build indigenous flight controllers revolving around the VEGA chip.
After an intensive technical evaluation, the top 100 teams will each receive two VEGA processor kits. The prize money, which was Rs 40 lakh in the first edition, has now grown to over Rs 65 lakh. Corporate internships, incubation support and cloud computing credits are also available to winners.
These numbers matter, but the real significance lies elsewhere. NIDAR 2.0 is not just a competition. It is a downstream expression of the SwaYaan initiative – MeitY’s national programme to develop and strengthen India’s drone ecosystem – approved in July 2022 with an outlay of Rs 89.87 crore over five years – which has already trained over 51,000 people across 30 premier institutions, including IITs, IIITs, NITs, IISc and C-DAC. NIDAR is its flagship innovation platform.
Staggering numbers
Now be sure that the timing of NIDAR 2.0 is neither accidental nor incidental. Since the country introduced the regulatory framework in 2021 and liberalised the sector, India’s drone industry has expanded rapidly. The numbers are not just impressive but staggeringly so, with hundreds of registered manufacturers, a growing export pipeline, and defence orders that run into thousands of units. Unfortunately, the quick-money syndrome took over, and what one has seen is that liberalisation has unlocked assembly rather than design.
The ability to put a drone together, which was never in doubt, proliferated – not the ability or the capacity to decide what goes inside it. What NIDAR 2.0 has done is completely change the matrix. Now the processor, the flight controller, and the sensor fusion algorithms that were once imported, licensed, or reverse-engineered from overseas designs will be Make-in-India components. The Government had to intervene when the industry failed to do so.
The heart of this transformation is the VEGA Processor. Unlike proprietary architectures, an Indian engineer working on a VEGA-based flight controller is not building on platforms that have been borrowed or licensed. RISC-V’s open standard offers the technological cover. The Intellectual Property remains in India, and, most importantly, the supply chain will be 100 per cent domestic over time. Most of all, the design skills that will evolve, develop, and further evolve will not evaporate if a foreign licensor changes its mind or if geopolitical disruptions cut off access to components.
Building the brains
MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan captured the intent plainly at the launch: NIDAR 2.0 takes students from flying drones to building their brains. When the drone’s brain runs on an Indian processor, the country is not merely training engineers – it is laying the foundation of a self-reliant drone industry.
The semiconductor dependence that NIDAR 2.0 seeks to address is not an accident; it is the accumulated consequence of a national posture that treated deep-tech design as someone else’s job. Anchoring drone autopilots to the VEGA processor is a deliberate correction – a feedback loop in which students who build around indigenous silicon become engineers who demand it, founders who commercialise it, and suppliers who scale it.
NIDAR 2.0 is among the more credible steps towards that goal: not because it is large in budget, but because it is precise in intent. It identifies a specific capability gap – indigenous avionics and drone intelligence – and builds a national programme around closing it. That is how ecosystems are built: not by decree, but by design.
BLURB:
The ability to put a drone together, which was never in doubt, proliferated – not the ability or the capacity to decide what goes inside it. What NIDAR 2.0 has done is completely change the matrix
