Rethinking ‘Air Power’ for the Governance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in India

The exponential progress in technological innovation and its consequent applications over the last two decades has hastened the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. The extraordinary pace of technological advances is leading to the merging of ‘the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that create both huge promise and potential peril’.1 The promise and peril identified here manifest in several systems such as advanced robotics, automation, and machine-to-machine communication. One such system is unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with drones being a significant type. A UAV is an aircraft that operates either remotely or on another aircraft without a human operator on-board, comprising of an operating system to allow for communication between components, control of sensors, navigation, avionics and communication.