The Cabinet Approved 15,000 Spraying Drones for Women's Self-Help Groups in 2023, 500 Were Distributed by March 2026, and Field Trials Found Drone Spraying Matching or Beating Knapsack Sprayers

On 29 November 2023 the Union Cabinet approved a scheme to give spraying drones to 15,000 women’s self-help groups, which rent them out to farmers. Each group sends one member for 15 days of training, five of them as a drone pilot, and trains a second member as a drone technician. On 24 March 2026 Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani, the Minister of State for Rural Development, told the Lok Sabha in a written reply that 500 drones had been distributed under the scheme, all of them in 2023-24.

That is 3.3 per cent of the 15,000 target. Three published field trials, on mustard, paddy and direct-seeded rice, found drone spraying matching or beating knapsack sprayers. Below are what the replies say, what the rules ask of a pilot, what the trials show, and what a field report from Madhya Pradesh found.

What the Cabinet approved

The Cabinet note on the Prime Minister’s Office website gives an outlay of Rs 1,261 crore. The Centre pays 80 per cent of the cost of a drone package, up to Rs 8 lakh. A cluster-level federation of groups can borrow the balance from the Agriculture Infrastructure Financing Facility, with a 3 per cent interest subsidy.

One member of each group, aged 18 or above, gets 15 days of training: 5 days of mandatory drone pilot training and 10 days on applying nutrients and pesticides. A second member or a family member is trained as a drone technician. Lead fertiliser companies, one assigned to each state, sit between drone makers and the groups. The note says they will promote nano urea and nano DAP, liquid fertilisers sold in small bottles, for the drones to spray. It projects extra income of at least Rs 1 lakh a year for each group.

The years are stated two ways. The note gives the outlay for 2024-25 to 2025-26 and the target for 2023-24 to 2025-26, while every Parliament reply since December 2024 gives the outlay as 2023-24 to 2025-26.

The Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare announced operational guidelines on 1 November 2024. They expect each group to find enough work to cover at least 2,000 to 2,500 acres a year.

The count in Parliament

MediaNama reported on 2 December 2024 on a Lok Sabha reply from the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers. It said 1,094 drones went to self-help groups in 2023-24, 500 of them under the scheme, and that the government had spent no direct money on the scheme so far, because the companies paid from internal resources.

On 17 December 2024 Ram Nath Thakur, the Minister of State for Agriculture, told the Lok Sabha that the fertiliser companies had bought the first 500 drones from their own resources. The target for 2024-25 was 3,090 groups in a first phase.

On 29 July 2025 Thakur gave the same 1,094 and 500 in the Lok Sabha, and said the remaining 14,500 drones had been allocated to state governments, with Uttar Pradesh at 2,236 and Maharashtra at 1,612.

On 13 February 2026 Thakur gave the Rajya Sabha a state-wise table “as on January 2026”. It totals 1,094 and matches the July 2025 table for 2023-24 in every one of its 22 states, so it shows no drones beyond the 2023-24 total. The 24 March 2026 reply then repeated the 500, with Andhra Pradesh at 96, Karnataka at 82 and Telangana at 72.

The approved period ended with the financial year on 31 March 2026, seven days after that reply. tuput found no published decision on an extension.

None of these replies gives hectares sprayed by the groups’ drones or what the groups earned. Each cites a study of the 500 drones by the Agricultural Development and Rural Transformation Centre in Bangalore, summarised as a widening of the groups into drone-based farming with more income opportunities.

What the trials show

A trial by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, part of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), in Delhi, published in the Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences in June 2025, grew Indian mustard over two winters. With 60 per cent of the recommended nitrogen applied as basal urea plus two nano urea sprays by drone, seed yield was 2,742 kilograms a hectare. Full farmer-practice urea gave 2,699 and the same plan by knapsack gave 2,660. The authors report those three as statistically alike. At 40 per cent basal nitrogen the drone plots gave 2,576 against 2,321 for the knapsack plots, a difference the paper marks as significant.

At the Malagi farm of the ICAR Krishi Vigyan Kendra in Sirsi, Karnataka, researchers from the University of Agricultural Sciences Dharwad compared drone spraying with the backpack sprayers farmers carry, called knapsack sprayers, on paddy in the 2023-24 kharif (monsoon) season. They report in the Journal of Farm Sciences that a drone-applied insecticide cut rice leaf folder damage by 66.96 per cent after the first spray, against 59.14 per cent by knapsack. Spiders, ladybirds, dragonflies and damselflies were less affected in the drone plots. The plots were 320 square metres, in one season at one site.

Researchers at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University and the International Rice Research Institute sprayed a herbicide on direct-seeded rice at Bhavanisagar and Coimbatore in 2022. Drones using 30 litres a hectare matched knapsack sprayers using 500 litres on weed control, according to their paper in Frontiers in Agronomy (22 November 2024). The knapsack put down the most droplets per area. The authors say the lower volume could limit human exposure to harmful chemicals, the same reason machines are sent into other hazardous workplaces. They name drift onto sensitive neighbouring crops on small holdings as a question for later work.

What a drone pilot has to hold

The Drone Rules 2021 were gazetted on 25 August 2021. The Ministry of Civil Aviation’s backgrounder of 28 January 2022 says nobody may fly a drone without a valid remote pilot licence, except for nano drones and micro drones used non-commercially. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation, the regulator, issues it within 15 days of the pilot receiving a certificate from an authorised drone school, for Rs 100 and 10 years. In a green zone, airspace up to 400 feet not marked as restricted, flying needs no permission.

A government backgrounder of 17 February 2026 says the licence has since been replaced by a Remote Pilot Certificate from the regulator. It counts 39,890 certificates, 244 approved training organisations and 38,575 registered drones as of that month. The 24 March 2026 reply says all the pilots in the scheme trained at approved organisations.

Spraying pesticides adds a second layer. A memorandum from the Agriculture Ministry’s Plant Protection Division dated 18 April 2022 provisionally approved, for two years, drone use of registered insecticides, fungicides and plant growth regulators that were already allowed for knapsack spraying. Registrants had to tell the Central Insecticides Board and Registration Committee the products, doses and crops, with a plan to generate data. The memorandum makes the registrant, applicant or drone operator solely liable for following the ministry’s standard operating procedure and the board’s safety rules under Rule 43 of the Insecticides Rules, 1971.

AgriBusiness Global reported on 1 May 2024 that the ministry had extended the approval to 18 April 2025. That is the latest notice tuput could find.

The nano urea argument

The Cabinet note names nano fertiliser as a main job for the drones, and that product is itself disputed. Down To Earth reported on 3 January 2024 on a two-year trial by Punjab Agricultural University scientists Rajeev Sikka and Anu Kalia. Plots given half the nitrogen in the soil plus two nano urea sprays yielded 21.6 per cent less wheat and 13 per cent less rice than plots given conventional nitrogen. The Delhi mustard trial above also paired the sprays with basal urea. The two trials differ in crop, nitrogen dose and place.

On 17 December 2024 the Standing Committee on Agriculture, chaired by the Congress MP Charanjit Singh Channi, pointed to a clash between promoting natural farming and a scheme built to spray liquid fertilisers and pesticides. Down To Earth reported that it asked the department how it would build synergies between the two. The semi-dwarf wheats of the 1960s responded to more fertiliser, as our account of M. S. Swaminathan and the Green Revolution explains.

What the first villages report

The Bangalore study, as quoted in the 29 July 2025 reply, found a drone covers an acre in 7 to 8 minutes and that one battery lasts 5 to 20 minutes in the air. Where the drone came without a utility vehicle, 42.68 per cent of the women reported transport problems, rising to 78.82 per cent in the South, and 68.66 per cent said hiring a vehicle was expensive. The reply adds that the farm mechanisation sub-mission now gives these groups 80 per cent assistance on multi-utility machines, which can also carry a drone.

Ground Report, an environmental news outlet focused on Madhya Pradesh, reported on 30 May 2026 from Ichhawar tehsil and Raisen district, and puts a drone’s cost at about Rs 10 lakh. A battery gives 16 to 17 minutes including calibration and 8 to 9 minutes of flying, and then needs nearly two hours to charge after 30 minutes of cooling. Sangeeta Malviya, a pilot, waited 10 to 15 days for technicians after a GPS fault. Her battery later failed, and a replacement at Rs 40,000 to 50,000 was beyond her. Her drone has stood unused since December 2025.

Vandana Kewat, in Raisen, received a vehicle and spare batteries from IFFCO, the fertiliser cooperative, which Malviya did not. “It’s very difficult to convince farmers,” Kewat told the reporters. The report says one pilot sprayed about 80 acres of maize and soybean in a month and earned Rs 16,000 to 17,000. In Madhya Pradesh the report gives 1,066 drones allocated and 89 distributed.

The Cabinet note of 29 November 2023 projected at least Rs 1 lakh a year in extra income for each group. The Parliament replies examined for this piece do not yet report what the 500 groups have earned.