UT first to use drone photography

Rajinder Nagarkoti

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 10

For the first time in the country, the UT Administration has used unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “drone” for capturing the aerial view of all solar rooftop projects in City Beautiful.

The Chandigarh Renewable Energy Science and Technology Promotion Society (CREST) has used ‘drone photography’ that will be used in CREST’s presentation of all its solar rooftop projects before the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) under the ‘Model Solar City’ project.

Santosh Kumar, Director, Science and Technology Department and CEO, CREST, said that this was for the first time in the country that a government department had used ‘drone photography’ to take photos of solar rooftop projects.

He said they had hired a Panchkula-based agency which used an UAV to click photos of nearly 20 such solar rooftop projects. These photos were also used in the “table calendar” of the department for 2015, which was released by the UT Adviser, Vijay Kumar Dev, he said.

Earlier on number of occasions, the department had used still photography to capture images of these projects. But in the absence of full view of these projects, the department’s work went unnoticed. So this time, the department decided to use an UAV to click photographs of these projects, a senior UT official said.

At present, the UT Administration is generating 2.86 million units using solar rooftop panels, which will be touched to 6.76 million units by the end of March 2015, an official of CREST says.

In 2012, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) had announced that 41 cities, including Chandigarh, Nagpur, Mysore and Gandhinagar would be developed as model solar cities.

Most govt depts make use of it

The UT police had once used an unmanned aerial vehicle in 2011 during Mayawati’s rally. At the moment, the government departments in country are the biggest users of drones. These departments are the police, armed forces, wildlife institutes and disaster managers, who used drones to locate stranded people during the Uttarakhand floods.

What is a drone?

Drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). It is either controlled by pilots on the ground or through a programme. Its biggest advantage is that, unlike manned machines, it can stay aloft for several hours.

UT Admn paid Rs1 lakh to P’kula-based agency

The UT Administration had hired a Panchkula-based agency, which charged nearly Rs1 lakh for clicking photographs of these projects and printing 1,000 images for table calendars. A 30-minute video film was also made to highlight the projects. Earlier, the department had used still photography to capture images of these projects.