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Pallavi: Hello, this is Pallavi Janakiraman, welcoming you to a new episode of EY’s Sustaining Sustainability podcast, where we discuss some of the most important issues that India needs to deal with in its Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) journey. Today, we will delve into a slightly unusual topic – how drones are being used for sustainability. Mostly in the news for their role in warfare, their potential in non-military sectors often gets masked. 

To understand how drones are being used across the world to win the sustainability battle, I have with me Arun Nagarajan, the EY Partner in Digital Consulting. Arun leads EY’s Drone Center of Excellence and supports our clients in evangelizing drone technology to unlock business value. Arun, welcome to our podcast.

Arun: Thanks, Pallavi. Pleasure to be here.

Pallavi: How is the topic of sustainability related to drones?

Arun: We are at a time when we are using fertilizers and chemicals to increase the yield of agriculture, when human activities are polluting the air. There is rampant deforestation as we mine more metals from the earth. ESG focuses on ensuring a sustainable balance across these activities. As it turns out, drones provide huge amounts of data to ensure we do the right analysis to take the right decisions to drive adoption of sustainable practices. So, drones have a great impact in ensuring that our activities are more sustainable and that we have a more balanced approach of managing the activities so that they are friendly to the environment.

Pallavi: That is really interesting to know. You had earlier mentioned that drones help to enable sustainable agriculture. How is that possible?

Arun: Today, agriculture yield is under pressure as there is a lot of demand for agricultural produce from the same amount of land, for which we use a lot of chemicals and fertilizers to improve the yield. In many cases, these fertilizers, and chemicals, when overused, enter into the food chain as they get leached into the soil and then they get leached into the water bodies as well. That is one of the key challenges that we see across our food chain. 

Drones are being used largely in precision agriculture. Instead of spraying chemicals and fertilizers across the entire farm, we use drones to analyze and then just spray enough chemicals and fertilizers at the right places in the farm to increase the yield and reduce the amount of fertilizers and chemicals used.

This also brings down the cost of agriculture and makes it more sustainable. This (precision agriculture) is one of the most evolving topics that you see, where drones are being used from an agriculture perspective.

Pallavi: Thank you for those valuable insights, Arun. It is fascinating to know how drones can help in precision agriculture. On that note, we would also like to know how the drones work and how we are adopting drones for agricultural purposes in India.

Arun: Drones essentially take aerial photographs, thermal images, optical images, or in many cases, multi-spectral images. You can use the thermal images to identify where there is a pest infestation on the farm. You can use spectral images to identify very subtle color changes on the leaves, which helps identify malnutrition or any other stress in the crops. 

Using this data, along with the GPS coordinates of where this data is measured, they use drones to spray specifically at the areas where the support is required. Wherever there is malnutrition, you spray adequate amount of fertilizers required to rectify it, and wherever there is pestilence, you will spray an appropriate amount of pesticides to ensure that you are able to manage the yield. This not only increases yield but also optimizes agricultural cost. This enables a very sustainable agricultural production across the entire life cycle.

One of the important facts of sustainability is to measure the biodiversity in the farms because excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers kills a lot of insects, bees and other animals on the plant and reduces the biodiversity. Hence, drones can be used to improve biodiversity. They can also be used to measure the extent of biodiversity, which is one of the key measures of sustainable agriculture.

In India, the government announced Kisan Drones and Drone Shakti in February 2022. Since then, there has been a significant adoption of drones in agriculture in India. Did you know that there has been almost a 2X increase in drone start-ups since this announcement in India in the last 18 months? A lot of these start-ups focus on driving precision agriculture and precision spraying. It is a very exciting field in terms of how drones are being used for sustainable agriculture in India.

Pallavi: The future of drones in sustainability indeed looks incredibly promising and I can imagine the impact that it would have, given the size of the agricultural sector in India. You also mentioned that drones help in controlling pollution. How can that be done using drones?

Arun: Yes, one of the key caveats or one of the key principles is the fact that what you cannot measure, you cannot control. Drones can provide a very effective way of collecting air samples, not only at the ground level, but at different altitudes in urban and industrial localities. One of the key measures of pollution, of course, is particulate matter (Parts per million or PPM) and also monitoring pollutants like methane and sulfer dioxides in air. Drones can collect samples and measure pollutants in air at different levels to provide a very accurate profile of urban and industrial pollution. 

Government authorities, for example in European countries like Romania, are using drones to monitor pollution levels more accurately and take policy decisions. The US and Canada are using drones to measure methane pollution from meat and dairy industries. Governments can use this pollution data from drones to enable policies and compliance for air pollution. All of this is having a big impact on controlling pollution and managing climate change.

Pallavi: Adding to that, Arun, as I understand, some mining companies are also beginning to use drones for specific sustainability operations. How do drones help in the mining sector?

Arun: Drones have one of the largest potential uses in the mining sector. From a mining perspective, it is very important to have sustainable practices to ensure that the mining happens in the regulated area and there is no illegal mining. Drones are used to track the extent of mining and the impact of mining on the ecology.

Drones are also used to see if there are any surface cracks, what the general ground conditions are, the kind of erosion, and the contamination to the water bodies in and around the mines. This helps provide very important information around sustainable practices being used in mines. 

Drones not only give a lot of information but also help reduce the number of people deployed in very hazardous conditions, say, wherever there is high contamination of methane or air pollutants within the mine environment. Since drones can be operated without any human involvement on-ground, they are very safe to manage and operate in mining environments. 

More importantly, whenever the mining activity is completed, it is important that the mining area is reforested. Drones can be used for reforestation after the mining activity is completed. Did you know that drones can help accelerate reforestation by approximately 100 times compared to any other manual reforestation techniques? This is largely used in South America and other mining countries, where they use drones to plant seeds and different kinds of trees. This enables faster and more cost-effective reforestation. 

Pallavi: Thanks a lot, Arun. One last question that our listeners are keen to know is that what is the current adoption of drones in general and for sustainability, in particular, within India?

Arun: One of the key visions for India to be among the primary drone manufacturing hubs in the world by 2030. With this vision, the government has evangelized the use of drones across multiple sectors, including mining and agriculture. Over the last 24 months, there has been a significant focus on manufacturing drones in India and adopting their technology across public and private companies so that they can be used to drive the push towards more sustainability and cost-effective practices. 

We have one of the most liberalized yet secure drone regulations in the world, which also fosters innovation and adoption, specifically in sustainability. There has been a significant adoption of drones in agriculture in the last 18 months, post the Drone Shakthi and the Kisan Drone initiatives. 

The focus has been on precision spraying of pesticides and fertilizers. This will evolve into precision agriculture and biodiversity enhancements over the next few years. India is an exciting place to (be in) to witness the growth of drones, especially in sustainability areas.

Pallavi: This has been a very interesting conversation, Arun. Thank you for joining us and sharing your insights on drones for sustainability operations.

Arun: It was my pleasure to speak about this topic. I think the use of drones in sustainability will only increase. Thanks for inviting me to the podcast.

Pallavi: Thank you, Arun. And with that, we will wrap this episode. Stay tuned for more insightful conversations on EY’s Sustaining Sustainability podcasts.

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