Drone City coming up in Anantapur: Mekapati

Visakhapatnam: IN a trend-setting move, Andhra Pradesh Government has decided to establish a Drone City in an area of 500 acres in Anantapur district bordering Karnataka.

Disclosing that they were preparing a layout for the ambitious project, he told the two-day Global Technology Governance Tokyo Summit of World Economic Forum on enabling future of mobility late evening on Tuesday, AP Minister for Industries and IT Mekapati Goutham Reddy said they were the first in India to form an exclusive corporation for manufacturing and use of drones. The corporation has worked with different departments and provided drone-based solutions like mapping land records leading to huge cost savings and time. The proposed Drone City will bring drone manufacturers, service providers and researchers together with common infrastructure like test sites, laboratories, 'walk to work' ecosystem and integrated logistics network. "About 47 players have committed about $20 million investment and employment to nearly 6,000 people. We are eager to evaluate partnerships with players from developed countries to induct proven technologies in key use-cases where we had successful pilots and scale-up the adoption further," he said.

Expressing satisfaction over various platform initiatives undertaken by the World Economic Forum to brainstorm and disseminate best practices, create enduring partnerships between the public and private sector for shaping the future of mobility,' he elaborated the initiatives being taken by AP to accelerate the future of mobility, more importantly through adoption of electric mobility and drones. Focusing on four pillars of conducive policy, enabling infrastructure, innovation and skilled manpower, Reddy said to drive EV adoption, governments, both at State and Central levels, need to work collaboratively with the industry towards an integrated policy, targeted towards demand creation, charging infrastructure, manufacturing and research & development.

He said while the Centre had rolled out the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (FAME-II) policy, the State governments were credited with introducing a host of EV-specific policies.

He said "we at the Government aim to phase out all the internal combustion engine vehicles in three major cities -Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada and Tirupati by 2024, and across all cities by 2030. We have the best in class "Electric Mobility Policy 2018-23" with an aim to subsidise demand and supply-side stakeholders together. The role of governments becomes all the more important to catalyse this virtuous cycle of adoption. The catalysing role needs to be holistic, such that the adoption is 'inclusive' and the benefits accrue to all stakeholders in the value-chain."

Pilot project

As the enabler of this cycle, AP has taken up a pilot project, where electric two-wheelers are provided free of cost for real time performance study of electric 2-wheelers with ward/village secretariat staff to facilitate effective delivery of 541 citizen-centric government services. Making the adoption accessible and financially sustainable needs innovative business models to address the challenges that are inhibiting wide-scale adoption, such as range anxiety, upfront cost differential, reliability of battery, and time required for battery charging. Reddy said to drive this innovation, AP established the NASSCOM Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence in Vishakapatnam, incubating about 10 startups across sectors.

He said as part of resolve to spread innovation culture, the government was also promoting adoption of 'skilling of workforce' and 'design thinking mindset' concepts. He declared that they were establishing 30 world-class skill colleges and a high-end skills university, with sectoral emphasis drawn from the industries and clusters to create a synergistic ecosystem to strike a balance between the demand and supply of workforce. The Minister also urged the industry leaders to look at solutions which are sustainable and have a long-lasting impact as the global problems faced now were the product of approaches driven by short-termism.