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

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

India has been talking about drones a lot lately, from Operation Sindoor to the government's $2 billion plan for combat drones. But long before that, in the forests of Chhattisgarh, security forces had already settled on the drone they trusted most. It is Chinese, made by a company called Da-Jiang Innovations, or DJI, and the government banned it years ago. So why do India's soldiers keep reaching for it?Based on investigation by Pratap Vikram Singh for The KenDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India has been talking a lot about drones lately. Operation Sindhur 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 Chathisgar, 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 Chathisgar. Over the last five or six years, small quadcopters 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 DaJang 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 Chathisgar 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 Pratab 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 DGI flying. So today, we're going to look at why Indian soldiers keep reaching out for the one drone that their government asks them not to use. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken.

I'm your host, Nickda Sharma, and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague, Rachel Vargheese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Friday, the 14th of 4th. Let's start with why soldiers love this drone. A superintendent of police in one of Chathisgar's Naxil hit districts put it quite plainly to the ken. A constable with no technical background can fly a DGI 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-noticed. 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.

Neil Mehta, who founded a stereo aerospace before Reliance bought it in 2019, told again that nobody comes close to DJI in the small drone category. Their scale and their pricing, he said, are extremely hot to match. And pricing is where the story really turns. A DGI enterprise drone with thermal and Lidar sensors costs up to 10 lakh rupees, including a maintenance contract. The closest Indian equivalent from IdeaForge runs 50 to 60 lakh rupees. And DGIS consumer variety, Mavik, which is the everyday workhorse of a patrol, costs under

$50,000. And this gap changes how a drone gets used. The same superintendent of police owns one IDGIS, which is a drone. forged drone and 10 to 12 DGIs. 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 again 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, DGI is remarkably easy to buy here. The loophole is emergency procurement. Big military platforms go through central tenders, but a DGI 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 DGI.

Two officials told again that the border security force or BSF flies an even larger DGI 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 route around the ban. Deals told again that DGI 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, see 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. India's Directorate of Revenue Intelligence has tracked this for years. In 2024, it seized 145 DGI drone smuggled from Nepal on two trucks. Months later, customs in Chennai opened a couple of.

container labeled as watch straps and found 253 drones inside along with thousands of walkie-talkies and VR headsets. The DRI calls drone smuggling a national security risk. Despite this, the trade has barely slowed down. And here is the detail that captures this entire story. When Customs seizes these drones, they do not always get destroyed. Officials say confiscated DGI drones are periodically handed to agencies under the Home and Defense ministries. So a drone caught entering the country can illegally end up back in the hands of the

very forces that wanted it. The state, in effect, ends up smuggling to itself. There is a quieter route as well. Drones now come in as parts and get assembled in India and are sold under Indian names. The DGCA is investigating one Bangalore-based company called Skylark exactly over this. A complaint from the Dron Federation of India compares Skylark's thermal drones. with DGI's part by part and alleges that the components were DGIs all along rooted in through a shell entity. Skylark did not respond to the Ken's questions. And the cost of all this is not something India has to imagine. In the Russia-Ukraine war, Russian forces exploited a flaw in DGIS software to locate Ukrainian drone pilots and target them. DGI says that it has since fixed all those flaws.

Now, whether a version of that weakness still sits somewhere inside the system is something Indian forces will find out either before it matters or after. The story that does the rounds and gives some sense of comfort inside the security establishment is that DJI only does surveillance while Indian firms are moving on to combat drones. So the two barely compete. That may be true on paper, but it still doesn't say anything about what leaning on a Chinese eye in the sky costs at the border. border to our soldiers. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full

subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Niktha Sharma, and edited by Radif CN.