DNA Edit: Flights of fear

The Indira Gandhi International Airport, the busiest and most secured airport in the country, was shut down for two hours twice on Sunday as pilots of two airlines reported spotting a “drone-like object”. The inordinate inconvenience caused to the people at large should give the Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) a pause for thought.

This incident puts on display the sloth of the government in formulating a policy on the issue. Now that the situation looks like one which has the making of a security disaster, the expectation is that the government will wake up. A simple Google search will show that drones of all shapes, sizes, and kinds are all too easily available online. Forget putting in place a regulatory and monitoring infrastructure, the country is bereft of a basic law that governs the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in India.

The last regulation — if you can call it that — was a public notice issued by the DGCA on October 7, 2014 proscribing “non-government agency, organisation or an individual” from launching a UAV in the Indian skies “for any purpose whatsoever”. If doing the bare minimum was ever an acceptable public policy, this is its most shining moment. Pray tell, what good would come of a public notice if the DGCA has no force or a law to implement its will on the use of drones? Simply blaming the DGCA is to miss the wood for the trees. It is high time a legislation is put in place and infrastructural and human resources be provided to check any repetition of this event.