India has set the goal of becoming a global drone hub by 2030, and it has immense potential for emerging as a major contributor to cargo drones and air taxis. This workshop on “Unified Airspace management and allied technologies” was organised jointly by CSIR-National Aerospace Laboratories (CSIR-NAL) and CSIR-National Physical Laboratory (CSIR-NPL) during 17 and 18 July 2025. This workshop was designed as a platform to bring together technologists, industry, academia, regulators, operators and policy-makers to chart a roadmap for the future and to address the challenges in building the ecosystem for urban air mobility.
The key objectives of this workshop were:
CSIR-NAL is proposing to work on different aspects of Urban Air Mobility, such as the design and development of a two-seater urban air taxi and evolving technologies for Urban Air Traffic Management and the Unified Airspace Management. Dr Abhay A Pashilkar, Director, CSIR-NAL, welcomed the dignitaries for their participation and set the pace for the first day of the workshop.
Dr Hanumanth Rao, DG, SAMEER, complimented the team for organising the workshop as it is the need of the hour. He gave a brief overview of the existing communication technologies like 4G and 5G, which are currently used by the various ecosystems. However, for the present context, he emphasised exploratory research on non-terrestrial communication technologies. Keeping in mind the complex interactions, that are anticipated between the aircrafts, rotor crafts, swarm of unmanned drones and the futuristic air taxies, he gave a call to the research and academic community to jointly carry out translational research on the various research verticals associated with the non-terrestrial communications like design and development of light weight compact antennas with high bandwidth and gain, implementation of grounding schemes in composite aircraft bodies, doppler studies in moving control stations, on-board Identification of Friends and Foes technologies, soft kill and hard kill techniques for rogue drones in civil airspace, counter-drone technologies, protocols for the non-terrestrial which are dynamically changing. He further encouraged collaborative work towards these multi-disciplinary research verticals and offered his continuous support to any collaborative initiatives.
Dr Kalaiselvi, Secretary DSIR & DG-CSIR, highlighted the challenges in air mobility, starting from aircraft, helicopters and a huge number of simultaneously operating drones of various kinds. Hence, there is a need to synergise various elements of the urban airspace. This can be realised by initiating research in areas of Sustainable Mobility using AI, a Blockchain-based framework, AI agents, and a virtual control room to ensure safety and security. She indicated that the workshop would help to know the latent challenges when attempts are made to customise these research verticals for the unified airspace management. She clarified that CSIR does not work in a silo, but as a team with all research organisations, line ministries, and academia for a noble cause. She said that while the first step is being taken today by providing a platform for exchanging thoughts and ideas and coming out with a roadmap for the research community, it is desirable that we all come together after a year and take a stock of the progress that would be jointly made based on the roadmap.
Dr Somanath, Former Secretary, DoS, complimented the gathering on organising the timely workshop, which would set the pace for taking up research initiatives to address the challenges associated with India-centric unified airspace management and allied technologies and subsequently extend it to the global community. He emphasised regulatory and policy requirements, identification of feasible technologies, addressing challenges of BVLOS, and exploring the realisation of a common framework by combining communication technologies, image-based object identification and tracking, multi-sensor data fusion capabilities for a fully traceable architecture for seamless communication with adequate safety levels. He cautioned that this effort would require setting up multiple test facilities and simulators. He encouraged CSIR-NAL to take the lead in the design activities, helping the regulatory bodies to frame policies, establishing the required research infrastructures, contributing to the HR training along with academia, indigenisation of the software and hardware and connecting all the stakeholders. Dr Somnath indicated that the workshop is the first step in the right direction. A sustainable effort is required to continue with funding from the concerned stakeholders.
Shri Samir Kumar Sinha, Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation, briefly gave an overview of the expanding aviation market in India. He highlighted the various initiatives of MOCA like the Drone Rules, 2021, Production Linked Incentives (PLI) schemes for drone, National Airspace Mapping and UTM integration plans, regulatory reforms & implementation mechanisms, and collaboration for seamless Civil-Military Airspace usage. On the dynamically changing Indian airspace, which is not just confined to aircraft or helicopters, but also has witnessed the entry of unmanned drones with roles in different sectors, he expressed his concerns about the complex Indian urban space.
The near future addition of manned air taxis would mandate the introduction of safety policies and a stringent certification framework. Keeping all these challenges in mind, Secretary MOCA emphasised taking up Mission Mode actions jointly by MoCA, CSIR, DGCA, Start-ups, Defence services, academia, public and private UTM providers on a war-footing basis to realise the Government’s vision of Viksit Bharat 2047. The workshop would enable the visions to become an actionable roadmap and emphasised not to wait to adapt to the future, but to lead to future development in an inclusive manner. He assured of full support of MOCA to facilitate any such collaborative initiatives taken by research organisations like CSIR-NAL.
