Picture a drone lifting off over a paddy field at first light, a fine mist settling evenly across the crop rows below, the pilot watching from the bund with a handheld controller. For a growing number of Indian farmers, that is no longer a glimpse of the future — it is how spraying gets done. And with a new factory in Tamil Nadu and two new farm drones, Dhaksha Unmanned Systems is building the machines to take that picture to many more fields.
Dhaksha Unmanned Systems’ DH-Agrigator E10 agricultural spraying drone. (Image: Dhaksha Unmanned Systems)
Dhaksha Unmanned Systems, the Chennai-based drone maker and a subsidiary of Coromandel International, has inaugurated a new manufacturing facility at Aymicheri in Kancheepuram, Tamil Nadu — and used the occasion to launch two new agricultural drones, the DH Agrigator E10 Prime and the DH Agrigator E10 Eco. The facility, opened by Coromandel International’s Executive Chairman Arun Alagappan, strengthens India’s indigenous drone manufacturing across agriculture, defence and enterprise.
A factory built for bigger programmes
The Kancheepuram facility is designed to let Dhaksha take on larger and more complex unmanned aerial vehicle programmes, while deepening the indigenisation of critical drone technologies. Alongside its agricultural work, the plant carries a dedicated production line for defence applications, including surveillance and logistics drones — giving the company greater control over the technologies at the heart of its machines and a stronger base to serve customers across its key verticals.
The setting matters. Kancheepuram sits around 75 kilometres southwest of Chennai, close to Dhaksha’s home base, and the new plant anchors a manufacturing story that runs from the farm to the front line: the same engineering bench that builds a crop sprayer also builds machines for surveillance, mapping and logistics.
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Two new farm drones, two different farmers in mind
The two drones launched at the inauguration share the Agrigator E10 platform and are built with indigenous components — but they are aimed at different hands. The DH Agrigator E10 Prime is aligned with the government’s Namo Drone Didi programme, which puts subsidised drones and pilot training in the hands of women’s self-help groups for agricultural spraying work. The DH Agrigator E10 Eco is the more affordable sibling, designed to widen access to drone-based spraying for small and marginal farmers and rural entrepreneurs who want to offer spraying as a service.
That pairing is the heart of the story: one machine carrying a national programme for women drone pilots, another lowering the price of entry for the smallest farms. Both put precision spraying — nutrients and crop protection chemicals applied evenly, from the air, without a worker walking the field with a tank on their back — within reach of more of rural India.
The Agrigator platform: built for the field
The Agrigator E10 is a small-category, battery-powered hexacopter built around high-precision spraying. The company lists a 10-litre spray tank, a maximum weight of 24.8 kg including payload, a 2-kilometre visual-line-of-sight range and a 50-metre operating altitude — and says the drone can spray up to 2 acres on a single charge. Safety is built in: the drone returns to launch on low battery, on communication failure, or when its tank runs empty, and it flies autonomous missions with return-to-home capability. Its medium-category sibling, the Agrigator E10 Plus, stretches coverage to up to 3 acres per charge.
Dhaksha’s pedigree in this field runs deep. The company says it is the first and only Indian manufacturer to receive DGCA Type Certification for multiple drone models across agriculture, mapping and surveillance — and its Kisan drones have already been delivered to IFFCO, putting its machines to work in Indian fields well before this launch. Beyond agriculture, its range spans swarm drones for surveillance, logistics drones, the Survigator DH-Q4 for mapping and survey, and fixed-wing VTOL aircraft for large-scale mapping — all designed and built in India.
As S. Sankarasubramanian, Director of Dhaksha Unmanned Systems and Managing Director and CEO of Coromandel International, put it at the inauguration, UAVs will play an important role in building a more productive, resilient and technology-enabled economy. With a new factory to build them in, and two new farm drones ready to fly, Dhaksha is putting that belief into hardware — one field, one flight, at a time.
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