Drones from across Pakistan border more than doubled in 2022: BSF DG

The BSF has been “bombarded” by the onslaught of drone flights from across the Pakistan border on the western front, and instances of the aerial vehicles bringing drugs, arms and ammunition more than doubled in 2022, the force's Director General Pankaj Kumar Singh has said. He said the force has recently established a state-of-the-art laboratory at a camp in Delhi to study drone forensics and the results have been very encouraging.

Security agencies could track the flight path and even address of criminals involved in this cross-border illegal activity that is rearing its head over the last few years, he said on Saturday.
"The BSF has been at the receiving end of the drone menace for quite some time... the versatility of the drone, which is very well known, has been posing problems to us with nefarious elements having found new uses of the drone due to its anonymity and quick flight at sufficient height bypassing the frontiers," he said.
The DG said this while briefing Union home secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla, who was chairing an event to inaugurate the forensic lab through a webinar session.Quantifying the enormity of the drone menace, the DG said while the BSF detected about 79 drone flights along the India-Pakistan international border in 2020, it increased to 109 last year and "more than doubled at 266 this year".
"The major culprit regions are Punjab which saw 215 flights this year... in Jammu, about 22 flights have been seen," Singh said.
"The problem is grave. We do not have a foolproof solution as of now. They (drones) have been bringing across narcotics, arms and ammunition, counterfeit currency and all kinds of things," he said.

The DG said initially the BSF grappled with the challenge of not knowing what to do and even when the drone fell they had "no clue" where was it coming from or going.