PIB TrackerIAF opens Mehar Baba drone-radar competition
The Indian Air Force launches the third edition of its indigenous-innovation challenge, this time on collaborative drone swarms working as an airborne radar.
What happened
- The Indian Air Force (IAF) has launched the third edition of the Mehar Baba Competition (MBC-3), its in-house challenge to seed indigenous niche aviation technology.
- The theme is "Collaborative Drone-Based Surveillance Radars" — building a proof of concept for a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) that together act as an airborne radar.
- The aim is a swarm capable of detecting, tracking and reporting aerial targets in a contested environment, rather than a single large airborne sensor.
- Registration opens 27 April 2026. Meritorious participants receive development funding, and the top three entries are honoured.
- MBC-3 was first announced by the Raksha Rajya Mantri (RRM), Shri Sanjay Seth, at Aero India 2025, the biennial aerospace exhibition held at Bengaluru.
- The IAF notes that the Mehar Baba series has already generated orders worth roughly ₹2,000 crore for India's unmanned-systems industry.
Background & context
The Mehar Baba Competition is not a one-off contest but a recurring IAF innovation programme launched in 2018. Its design mirrors the wider push to pull defence procurement away from imports and towards Indian startups, MSMEs and academia under the broader Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) drive in defence manufacturing. Each edition fixes one operational problem the Air Force actually faces, throws it open to Indian innovators, funds the promising entries, and aims to convert winning prototypes into orders — a "challenge-to-contract" pipeline rather than a prize that ends at a trophy.
The competition is named in honour of Air Commodore Mehar Singh, DSO, MVC — affectionately called "Mehar Baba". Born in Lyallpur in 1915, he joined the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell, in 1934 and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) at the age of 29. In 1947 he led the airlift mission that carried the first contingent of the Indian Army in a Dakota aircraft to Srinagar during the Jammu and Kashmir operations, and he was the first pilot to land at Leh. He became the first IAF officer to be awarded the Maha Vir Chakra (MVC), India's second-highest wartime gallantry award. Naming a forward-looking technology challenge after a 1947 aviation pioneer is deliberate — it links indigenous innovation to the IAF's own institutional memory.
The thematic progression across editions shows how the IAF has escalated the technical ambition. The first edition sought "Swarm Drones for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) Operations" — using drone swarms to deliver aid and survey disaster zones. The second edition targeted "Swarm Drone-Based Foreign Object Debris (FOD) Detection on Aircraft Operating Surfaces" — automating the safety check that clears runways and taxiways of debris that can be sucked into jet engines. The third edition (MBC-3) moves from logistics and safety into a hard combat-support problem: making many small drones cooperate as a distributed sensor that can see and track aerial threats. The trajectory runs HADR → runway safety → contested-airspace surveillance — each edition narrower, harder and closer to a front-line operational requirement than the last.
It helps to place MBC within the IAF's and the Ministry of Defence's wider innovation architecture. It is one of several routes by which the armed forces now reach Indian innovators directly. The flagship parallel is iDEX (Innovations for Defence Excellence), run by the Defence Innovation Organisation, which funds startups and MSMEs through its Defence India Startup Challenge (DISC); the procurement enabler is the Technology Development Fund (TDF) managed by DRDO; and demand on the ground is anchored by the SRIJAN portal for indigenisation and the rising domestic-procurement share of the defence capital budget. MBC differs from these in being service-specific and theme-led — the IAF itself sets a single operational challenge each cycle and shepherds winning prototypes towards orders. Where iDEX is a standing, cross-service platform, MBC is an episodic, problem-of-the-day contest owned by one service. The two are complementary, not duplicative.
The technology at the heart of MBC-3 — the military drone swarm — is itself worth understanding. A swarm is a group of autonomous or semi-autonomous UAS that share data and coordinate behaviour, so the loss of any single drone does not break the formation. Asking such a swarm to act as a collaborative surveillance radar means distributing the sensing task: instead of one powerful radar on one aircraft, many small airborne sensors fuse their returns into a single tracked picture of aerial targets. The advantages an aspirant should be able to name are resilience (no single point of failure), cost (cheap, attritable platforms), coverage (a dispersed sensor net), and survivability in a jammed or defended airspace. The hard problems are autonomy, secure inter-drone communication, data fusion, and command-and-control — exactly the proof-of-concept gaps MBC-3 asks Indian teams to close.
For Prelims
- Entity: Mehar Baba Competition (MBC) — an IAF initiative for indigenous niche aviation technology; current edition is MBC-3.
- Launched: 2018 · conducted by the Indian Air Force (Ministry of Defence).
- MBC-3 theme: "Collaborative Drone-Based Surveillance Radars" — a swarm of UAS functioning as an airborne radar to detect, track and report aerial targets.
- MBC-3 registration: opens 27 April 2026; announced by RRM Sanjay Seth at Aero India 2025.
- Named after: Air Commodore Mehar Singh, DSO, MVC ("Mehar Baba") — first IAF recipient of the Maha Vir Chakra; led the 1947 airlift of Indian Army troops to Srinagar; first to land at Leh.
- Edition themes: 1st — Swarm Drones for HADR; 2nd — Swarm Drone-based FOD Detection on operating surfaces; 3rd — Collaborative Drone-Based Surveillance Radars.
- Industry impact: the series has generated orders of ~₹2,000 crore for the unmanned-systems sector.
- Aero India: India's biennial aerospace and defence exhibition, organised by the Ministry of Defence, held at Air Force Station Yelahanka, Bengaluru.
- Key terms: UAS = Unmanned Aerial System; a "drone swarm" is multiple autonomous drones cooperating under shared control; an "airborne radar" detects targets from the air rather than from a ground station.
Why it matters
The release sits at the intersection of two exam-relevant themes: indigenous defence innovation and the military use of drone swarms. The problem MBC-3 addresses is real and current. Conventional airborne surveillance leans on a few high-value, expensive sensor aircraft; losing one is costly and degrades the picture. A swarm of cheap, expendable drones acting as one distributed radar is harder to neutralise, can be reconstituted quickly, and offers resilience in a "contested environment" where jamming and air defences are active. This idea has moved to the centre of contemporary military thinking after recent conflicts demonstrated the battlefield value of low-cost unmanned systems.
The model also matters for defence industrial policy. By funding proofs of concept and then converting them into orders — the ~₹2,000-crore figure the IAF cites — the competition shortens the long, import-heavy procurement cycle and routes demand to domestic startups, MSMEs and research labs. It is a concrete instance of the Atmanirbhar Bharat in defence approach: build indigenous capability in a "niche" technology rather than buying it off the shelf abroad. For an aspirant, MBC is a clean, citable example of government-as-anchor-customer seeding a domestic high-technology ecosystem.
There is a third, less obvious significance — the dual-use nature of the underlying technology. The same swarm-sensing and data-fusion capability that MBC's earlier editions applied to disaster relief and runway safety carries over into combat surveillance, and vice versa; investment in one strengthens the others. This blurring of the civil-military boundary in drones is precisely why drones recur across the UPSC syllabus — in disaster management, in agriculture and logistics, in border surveillance, and now in air defence. MBC, read across its three editions, is a single example an aspirant can deploy in answers spanning all of those. The competition therefore functions less as a procurement headline and more as a marker of how India is trying to build sovereign capability in an emerging technology before dependence sets in — the recurring theme in questions on indigenisation and new technology.