The Civil Aviation Ministry and Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) have granted one-year conditional exemption from the Unmanned Aircraft System rules to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) to enable it to study feasibility of using drones for Covid-19 vaccine delivery in collaboration with IIT Kanpur. ICMR had sought an exemption from the rules that ban use of drones for payload delivery.

“These exemptions shall be valid only if all conditions and limitations as stated for the respective entities are strictly adhered to. In case of violation of any condition, the exemption shall become null, and void and action may be initiated by MoCA & DGCA,” the Civil Aviation Ministry said Thursday in a statement.

Conditional drone use exemption has also been granted to a few other entities for a period of one year - municipal corporations of Dehradun, Haldwani, Haridwar and Rudrapur for preparation of GIS based property database and electronic tax register, two divisions of Indian Railways also received permission to experiment with drones for train accident site inspection as well as maintaining safety and security of the railway assets.

In addition to these, Vedanta Ltd (Cairn Oil & Gas) also received the conditional drone usage exemption for data acquisition for asset inspecting and mapping till April next year.