Hyderabad-registered start-up Scandron Private Ltd has launched a rural entrepreneurship programme to provide employment to youth to operate and provide drone services, its founder and Chief Executive Officer Arjun Naik has said. 

Scandron trains youth in drones in association with its partner company Magellanic Cloud. The company takes people from every district, particularly in Telangana, and provides them with free training on how to use agricultural drones.

Service platform

The company is setting up a platform for drone services that will be manned by entrepreneurs and farmers. “In every village, a couple of farmers will buy our drones. We train the pilots and have a platform that matches the customer’s needs. It is then for the service provider to provide the service, charge a fee and manage on his own,” Naik told businessline. 

 The idea is to provide employment opportunities for rural youth and create entrepreneurship. “Since we are promoting rural entrepreneurship, training is provided free of cost,” he said. 

Scandron’s drones have been designed to be “very forgiving in the way they are operated so that collisions can be avoided and tolerance is inbuilt.  “A lot of functions in our drones are automated. What we actually tell the youth, who undergo training, the dos and don’ts. We give them the best practices on what to do and teach them the safety aspects. These usually work,” he said.

Creating a pool of pilots

The firm trains students in batches by bringing them to its place and provides training, accommodation and food free of cost until they graduate. “We ensure that there will a pool of pilots available who can operate the drones that go out in the market safely. They know what to do and how to maintain it,” the company’s founder and CEO said.

The company trains farmer producer organisations (FPOs) as they too have plans to buy drones. Training for FPOs is free of cost.

Scandron has tied up with several banks, including HDFC and ICICI. “The government has a programme to promote drones in place. So these banks process the need of FPOs and individuals. They handhold them through the entire process from buying to using the drones,” Naik said.

2 types of drones

 The start-up has produced over 100 such drones for use in the agriculture sector. It has delivered a few and has orders on hand, he said.  “We manufacture agricultural spraying drones to spray pesticides and fertilisers. We also have artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform in which the drones capture data and use the AI to look into various aspects of the crop such as its health, pest attack, weather-related problems and if the crop is ready for harvest,” he told businessline.

For example, drones are hired by coffee plantations to scan the estate and provide details of the progress of the crop. “Besides coffee, drones can be used for other crops such as cotton, chilli, tea etc,” the founder and CEO of Scandron, which is into producing drones for industrial inspection and infrastructure surveillance, said. 

Tie-ups with firms

The drones cost from ₹4 lakh onwards and can cut farming costs by 30-40 per cent in the long term. The drones are 40-60 per cent efficient than humans spraying fertilisers or pesticides.

The battery in the drones lasts for 200-300 cycles depending on their usage. Each time the battery is charged, the drone can operate on 2-3 acres.  

Scandron has tied up with pesticide and fertiliser companies such as Insecticide India for spraying services. It has tapped into these firms to assess a large area of farmlands. “For example, the chilli crop that is grown in a huge area. We can actually detect in which areas there are pest attacks and areas where the attacks are fewer. This will help apply the right amount of pesticide and the place on the farm,” Naik said. 

The start-up has done a study with Insecticide India on the efficacy of applying pesticides and insecticides at different concentrations.  

100s of pilot projects

On the future role of drones, Naik said they would help assess the crop from planting till harvest. “The good thing is you can start predicting ahead of time what the harvest size is going to be because India tends to have a lot of fluctuations in prices,” he said. 

Uses of pesticides, herbicides and insecticides will be minimised particularly with the use of AI. It could lead to an amalgamation of technology with spraying combined with AI along with sensors on the ground that provide data on moisture and soil health.  

Stating that drone technology is an effective tool, the Scandron founder said his company has carried out over 100 pilot projects in association with companies on the crop inputs side, mainly in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh through its parent firm. “We have carried out projects with different types of crops and conditions to understand the efficacy and how things work. The results have been very promising,” he said. 

The company has taken its time to come up with a total solution as it is not trying to sell drones for the “sake of selling”. States in southern India, Maharashtra and Punjab are evincing keen interest in drones with demand being more for chilli and cotton, Naik said. 

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