Looking up at the drones

Why in the News

Data pooled from over 1,200 drones intercepted in Punjab since 2024 has mapped the cross border smuggling network that flies them. The mapping names the launch pads inside Pakistan’s Punjab, the Indian villages where payloads are dropped, the hours of peak activity and the altitudes flown. It follows an interception count that has held steady rather than fallen, with 294 Pakistani drones downed by the Border Security Force (BSF) and allied agencies in Punjab in 2024, 287 in 2025 and roughly the same number again by August 2026. Punjab had answered the threat in August 2025 with the Rs 51.4 crore ‘Baaz Akh’ (Hawk Eye) Anti-Drone System (ADS), the first state level anti-drone grid in the country. The same dataset shows why that answer is not holding, since drones now carry satellite links and a return to home fail-safe that turns them back before they can be brought down. The network along Punjab’s 550-km International Border is therefore better understood than at any point since 2019 and no easier to stop.

What is the ‘Baaz Akh’ Anti-Drone System?

1. What it is: A state funded anti-drone grid deployed by the Punjab government as a second line of defence behind the BSF’s own portable interception equipment.
2. The four functions it performs: It detects a drone’s movement and signal, tracks it on a digital map, jams its control link, and forces an emergency landing for ground recovery.
3. What it jams: It disrupts either radio frequency control signals or satellite navigation frequencies, and can identify the ground control station operating the drone.
4. Its reach: The system works over a range of 8 to 10 km and issues automated alerts to security agencies.

What does the intercepted drone data reveal about the network’s geography?

1. Eight launch pads, two of them primary: Sustained sorties come from at least eight launch pads in Pakistan’s Punjab, with the villages of Jahman and Masteki as the main two.
2. Both primary pads face Tarn Taran: Jahman sits directly across from the Khalra sector in Tarn Taran district. Masteki lies in the Sehjra enclave, a pocket of Pakistani territory surrounded by India on three sides, roughly opposite Khem Karan town.
3. The remaining pads: They lie near Kasur, opposite Khem Karan; Qila Jiwan Singh, opposite Rajatal in the Attari sector; Wagah, opposite Attari; and Narowal, across from Dera Baba Nanak in Gurdaspur district.
4. The landing areas: Payloads are dropped at Bhindi Saidan, Attari, Rajatal, Dall, Daleri, Maari Meghaan, Wan and villages around Khem Karan including Kals and Mastgarh.
5. Where the drones are recovered: The highest number of interceptions on the Indian side occur 3.5 km to 10 km from the International Border.

What do the timing and flight patterns show?

1. A fixed nightly window: Maximum activity falls between 10 pm and 4 am, at an average of 12 to 15 drones an hour.
2. The drops cluster on two days: The highest number of consignment drops take place on Thursdays and Saturdays.
3. Sortie length separates stock from modified platforms: The average sortie runs 45 minutes, and modified drones average 24 minutes. Eg. One DJI Matrice drone recorded 42.67 minutes and a DJI Matrice 4 Pro recorded 15 minutes before it was downed.
4. Altitude separates them too: Commercial DJI platforms fly at about 500 feet, and a modified eight rotor platform, the octocopter, was tracked at 2,500 feet.
5. The drop point is chosen for pickup, not for accuracy: Consignments are dropped on agricultural fields for couriers to collect. Navigational error and incorrect GPS data put some payloads onto farmhouses and homes instead.

How has the technology changed since the incursions began?

1. The 2019 baseline: Pakistani drones were first noticed in Punjab around 2019, operating on rudimentary radio frequency direction control.
2. The 2026 platform: Drones now operating in Punjab carry satellite communication and anti-jamming capability, and some downed in Punjab were navigating on Starlink satellite links.
3. The airframes are commercial and Chinese made: The platforms in use for drug smuggling include the DJI Mavic 4 Pro, which can fly multiple sorties, and the DJI Matrice 300 RTK, which carries a large payload.
4. The payload has not narrowed: The consignments carry narcotics, weapons and explosives, launched from pads deep inside Pakistan’s Punjab and dropped across the border under cover of darkness.

Why does the fence no longer decide what crosses the border?

1. It was built for a different mode of entry: The 462-km fence along the International Border went up mainly in the late 1980s and early 1990s to stop infiltration and smuggling during the militancy years.
2. What it consists of: It is a multi-layered barrier of 8 to 12 feet, topped with rows of concertina and razor wire and, in places, high voltage ‘cobra’ wires, with a patrol track, observation towers and border outposts along it. Most of the feasible land border had been fenced and floodlit by 1993.
3. It does not stand on the border: Older ground rules placed it some 150 yards inside Indian territory. In many stretches it was built two to three km in, leaving large tracts of farmland between the fence and the Zero Line.
4. The gaps are physical as well as aerial: The line carries riverine and flood related gaps, and the incursions it was built to stop now arrive over it rather than through it.

Why does detection not translate into seizure?

1. The return to home fail-safe defeats the jam: Drones detect the interference from jamming, locking or control signal disruption and fly back to their launch point in Pakistan before they can be neutralised or recovered on the Indian side.
2. Jamming weakens with distance: Some attempts fail simply because the drone is too far from the jamming unit when it is engaged.
3. Autonomous platforms are not vulnerable to the method: Current systems fail against resilient drone networks built with features that reduce dependence on radio frequency control, which is what jamming targets.
4. Coverage is thin: Security officers put the requirement at at least 100 jamming units for effective wider coverage, against the units now deployed on vehicles and in fixed positions.
5. Recovery depends on people, not the grid: Interception is a layered system requiring coordination between the BSF, police quick reaction teams and ground recovery parties, so detection without a rapid ground response yields no seizure.
6. Three threats the grid does not yet address: Small and low signature drones go undetected, drones operating together in swarms on artificial intelligence and decentralised communication are anticipated, and remote terrain with harsh weather leaves some drop zones inaccessible.

What role do the border villages play in interception?

1. They are the first reporting layer: Punjab set up village defence committees to help tackle cross border smuggling and drones, and their members coordinate with the BSF and local authorities on stray drones and recovered weapons.
2. The reporting chain is unreliable: A committee member in Gilpan, where a drone dropped a kg of contraband in his kitchen garden 700 metres from the fence, got no response from the local police station or the Deputy Superintendent of Police, and the local police moved only after the Senior Superintendent of Police in Tarn Taran was called.
3. Recovery is a race the couriers usually win: In the same village a second drone dropped a payload at the village edge that evening. The BSF received the location and moved to cordon the area, and the men had already collected the consignment and fled by the time it arrived.
4. Farmers fear prosecution more than the drop: A farmer whose field received a consignment in Mahawa, Amritsar, approached the committee fearing arrest, and the police eventually filed a case against unidentified persons.
5. Some settlements sit inside the flight path: Mahawa lies a kilometre from the Zero Line with nearly 150 of its 2,800 acres between the Zero Line and the fence, and drones travel up to six kilometres inside the border directly over houses and fields.
6. Activism against the trade carries a cost: The sarpanch of Attari village, a settlement of around 25,000 known for its campaigning against drugs and smuggling, was injured in an alleged attack by narcotics smugglers.

Challenges to countering cross border drone smuggling

1. The cost asymmetry runs the wrong way: A commercial quadcopter costs a fraction of the detection and jamming equipment needed to stop it, so the defender pays more per sortie than the smuggler. Eg. The DJI platforms recovered in Punjab are off the shelf civilian models sold for survey and photography work.
   The Fix: Shift procurement toward cheap distributed sensors feeding one command picture, rather than a small number of high cost integrated units.
2. Jamming cannot be used freely in civil airspace: Broad spectrum jamming and navigation spoofing interfere with civil aviation and telecom signals, which limits where and how long a grid can be switched on. Eg. Amritsar’s Sri Guru Ram Dass Jee International Airport sits within a few tens of kilometres of the border stretches under surveillance.
   The Fix: Authorise narrow band directional jamming tied to a designated counter drone corridor, cleared in advance with the civil aviation regulator.
3. Attribution stops at the launch pad: A recovered drone establishes the route and the airframe, and it does not establish who financed or ordered the consignment. Eg. Cases from border villages routinely close against unidentified persons because the courier is the only link recoverable on the ground.
   The Fix: Treat each recovered drone as a forensic exhibit, with serial, flight log and payload traced through a single dedicated investigation unit rather than by the local police station.
4. Responsibility is split across agencies: Border guarding, state policing and airspace regulation sit with different authorities, so no single body owns the counter drone task end to end. Eg. Punjab’s grid is a state asset operating alongside the BSF’s own portable interception equipment on the same stretch of border.
   The Fix: Place the state grid, the border force’s equipment and police response under one joint operations centre per border district.
5. Interdiction does not touch demand: Stopping a consignment in the air does nothing to the narcotics market that pays for the next one. Eg. Village committee members link the drone drops directly to drug use among young people in the border belt.
   The Fix: Pair the counter drone grid with treatment and de-addiction capacity in the border districts, so the seized supply is not simply replaced.
6. Legal cover for the technology is thin: Bringing down an aircraft, jamming a signal and seizing a payload each rest on different statutory powers, and none was written with armed drones in mind. Eg. Civil drone operations in India are governed by the Drone Rules, 2021, which regulate lawful operators rather than hostile cross border flights.
   The Fix: Enact a standing counter unmanned aircraft framework naming the authorities empowered to detect, jam, down and seize, and the evidentiary status of what is recovered.

Conclusion

The border belt’s smuggling geography is no longer a matter of inference, since the launch pads, the drop villages, the flying hours and the altitudes are now on record. That record shifts the problem from intelligence to coverage, because a mapped network still needs equipment dense enough to engage it before it turns back. The measure to watch is whether the jamming grid reaches the density its own operators have asked for, and whether the annual interception count starts falling rather than holding flat. A count that stays level while the grid expands would show the platforms are outrunning the countermeasure rather than being contained by it.

Back2Basics: Border Security Force

1. What it is: India’s primary border guarding force, raised on 1 December 1965 after the India-Pakistan war exposed the limits of relying on state armed police on the border.
2. Who it reports to: It is a Central Armed Police Force under the Ministry of Home Affairs, and it guards the India-Pakistan and India-Bangladesh borders in peacetime.
3. Where its powers come from: The Border Security Force Act, 1968 gives its personnel powers of search, seizure and arrest within a notified belt running inland from the border.
4. How far that belt extends: The Union government extended that jurisdiction to 50 km from the border in Punjab, West Bengal and Assam in 2021, up from 15 km in Punjab.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2023, GS3, 10 marks] The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by our adversaries across the borders to ferry arms / ammunitions, drugs, etc., is a serious threat to internal security. Comment on the measures being taken to tackle this threat.”