2020 India Drone Registration – Fees, Trackers, Penalties & Rules

Well, if you have a drone or using one in India, then you have to register it with their details on an aviation minister portal. This mid-January, including small toy drones users in India, has to be registered and the same has been said by the Aviation minister Harshdeep Singh Puri on Monday. He also mentioned that the process of registering drones will be starting in a few weeks and Aviation ministry sources say the process of registering drones will begin around the 13th of January.

The reason behind this move is to get a database of all the drone users in the country and the users should be giving their details along with the details of the drone on an official portal. This exercise is for the people who have already got the drones and who are planning to buy them in the future will be completing the registration process while buying it. According to the sources from the Aviation ministry, here are the rules and penalties.

• The current users of the drone will be given a window of a month to enlist their drones.
• Users found using drones without enlisting by the given window might be punished and action could be taken against them.
• Basically the exercise will begin with nano drones that weigh up to 250 grams and also micro-drones which weigh in between 250grams to 2Kg since these two accounts for 80 percent of drones used in the county.
• The Nano drones used as toys should also be registered since even a 1 KG drone can be sold as toys.
• The registration of nano and micro drones will be free.
• The nano drone users need to go through two to four hours of a training session.
• The micro-drone uses need to go through 20 to 25 hours of a training session.
• The users need to install a tracker on their drone (Could be cost around Rs. 5000 to Rs. 7000).

After the training session, the users will be going through an online video test and all the officials said that all this is work in process and all the rules will be finalized soon. It is also said that the officials are looking for a GSM-based tracker and the government is keen on implementing these just to have a database of the drone users considering the security implications of using the drones.

Once these are done, tracking these drones will be easy and can be safely operated even in green zones or areas where they will be allowed. Aviation minister Harshdeep Singh Puri also said that experiments on using these commercial drones beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) range will start this month and then DGCA will be issuing draft rules for this Category.

Clearing rules for BVLOS use of drones will give the way for commercial use of drones in India as currently drones can be flown conditionally only within line of sight. Furthermore, Potential use of drone technology for commercial purposes is high and experiments to study the same will be carried out later this month. The draft rules for this category will be issued by DGCA and Draft Civil aviation requirements will be developed and shared with stakeholders for feedback.

Do you own a drone? Are you going to register it? if your answer is no, then get ready to be penalized as the officials might implement penalties for the same. As we already know, in India drones (except nano) are not allowed to be flown above 50 feet in enclosed premises and remotely piloted aircraft owned by security and intelligence agencies need to have a unique identification number. Comment in the section below if you have more queries on the same and stay tuned to PhoneRadar for more.