Turf wars expose the Make-in-India mirage of Indian drone companies

On April 17, Tej Pratap Singh, who claims to be a right-to-information (RTI) activist, held a press meet in Delhi, seeking to shake up India’s drone sector. At the one-hour-long conference, he pointed to an incident where resellers of publicly-listed drone maker IdeaForge Technology were disqualified from the government’s online procurement marketplace for the use of Chinese components in their products.

Singh alleged that IdeaForge’s use of Chinese components was a “national security threat” since it had supplied drones to India’s defence sector previously. Singh’s allegations pushed IdeaForge to issue a statement, clarifying that “the issue was related to non-critical components manufactured by a Swiss OEM, with a country of origin in China”.

This wasn’t the first volley Singh fired at India’s drone space. Earlier this year, Singh had filed a petition in the Delhi High Court alleging a drone industry body—Drone Federation of India (DFI), which counts over 550 drone companies as members—of forging documents, demanding a CBI enquiry into the matter.

At the recent press conference, however, Singh failed to answer questions from the media about how he obtained this information since it didn’t come up through an RTI request. He also didn’t answer questions about why he had taken aim at just IdeaForge, since it is hardly the only company that was found using Chinese-made components in its drones.