China's Tianying stealth drone (as claimed in a propangada video by China)

New Delhi: In the year 2021 there were as many as 68 drone sightings in India and this has raised concerns over a new security threat. The Border Security Force is looking for ways to detect the smaller drones that have been used to smuggle in narcotics and arms from Pakistan.

The investigations that have been conducted into the various drone sightings in the country have established that they are coming in from Pakistan and have been extensively used by terror groups such as the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad both in Jammu and Kashmir as well as Kashmir.

These made in China drones are being provided to the terrorist groups by the ISI.

In January the Intelligence Bureau had said that the Lashkar-e-Tayiba held a meeting of its top commanders in Pakistan during which their drone strategy against India was discussed.

An IB officer tells OneIndia that during a meeting with the top commanders of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad at Taxila in the Punjab province, it was decided to carry out small bomb attacks closer to the border using the Chinese commercial drones.

The ISI also had a follow up meeting in Kotla district of Pakistan occupied Kashmir to take stock of the plan that had been set in motion, the IB officer cited above said. Security officials said that it would be particularly challenging to tackle this issue given the fact that the heavy winter with the fog in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab will make anti-drone operations even harder.

On the rising day of the Border Security Force, its director general, Rakesh Asthana had spoken about the challenge, while pointing out that a drone had been intercepted with a huge load of weapons and ammunition in Jammu's Kathua sector on June 20 2020.

In the past couple of months, the Intelligence Bureau has raised concerns about Pakistan using bigger drones to smuggle in arms and ammunition in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) on the other hand designated Bharat Electronics as the lead agency for the production and development of an anti-drone system.

This is an important development since rogue drones have become India's latest security headache.

These drones are a potential threat and the government had been looking for solutions to counter this problem. In this regard the agencies conducted a data estimation and learnt that there are over 6 lakh rogue or unregulated drones of various sizes and capacities.

Recent incidents like the lethal drone attack on Saudi Arabia's largest petroleum company and arms dropping by UAVs in Punjab from across the India-Pakistan border has only alerted the agencies to come up with a plan to counter the drones.

These agencies are now looking at some specific anti-drone techniques like sky fence, drone gun, ATHENA, drone catcher and Skywall 100 to intercept and immobilise suspicious and lethal remote-controlled aerial platforms.

A recent paper titled 'Drones: A new frontier for Police' published in the Indian Police Journal (IPJ) by IPS officer and Additional Director General in Rajasthan Police, Pankaj Kumar Singh, has talked about these new techniques.

A drone gun is capable of jamming the radio, global positioning system (GPS) and mobile signal between the drone and the pilot and forces the drone to ground in good time before it could wreak any damage. This Australia designed weapon has an effective range of 2 kms, the paper said.

Another solution to block a lethal drone is the sky fence system that uses a range of signal disruptors to jam the flight path and prevent them from entering their target, a sensitive installation or event venue, it said.

Officials said prototypes of these counter-drone weapons were displayed for the first time at an open field in a BSF camp in Bhondsi, Haryana last week as part of a national conference organised by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD) on anti-drone technology.