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By:

Commodore S.L. Deshmukh

31 October 2024 at 8:30:19 am

The Beam That Blinds the Drone

As cheap drones reshape the battlefield, India’s T-SHUL BEAM points to a future in which electronic warfare may matter as much as firepower The drone has definitively become the weapon of choice for the modern battlefield. Cheap, expendable and increasingly autonomous, unmanned aerial vehicles can now threaten troops, armour, airfields and critical infrastructure without requiring the attacker to risk a pilot. Their proliferation has created a corresponding demand for counter-drone systems...

The Beam That Blinds the Drone

As cheap drones reshape the battlefield, India’s T-SHUL BEAM points to a future in which electronic warfare may matter as much as firepower The drone has definitively become the weapon of choice for the modern battlefield. Cheap, expendable and increasingly autonomous, unmanned aerial vehicles can now threaten troops, armour, airfields and critical infrastructure without requiring the attacker to risk a pilot. Their proliferation has created a corresponding demand for counter-drone systems that can respond quickly and at a cost proportionate to the threat. This is where beam-based anti-drone technology enters the picture. Broadly, such systems fall into two categories. Hard-kill systems use concentrated laser energy to physically damage or destroy a drone. Soft-kill systems, by contrast, use radio-frequency or electromagnetic energy to disrupt the electronic links that allow a drone to communicate, navigate and transmit information. Sophisticated Weaponry Hard-kill laser systems focus an intense beam of light on a vulnerable part of an incoming UAV - its carbon-fibre structure, control surfaces, battery or other critical components. The concentrated energy rapidly heats the target, potentially burning through its structure or disabling optical sensors and bringing the aircraft down. India’s DRDO has demonstrated a 30kW laser system, while Israel’s Rafael has developed the Lite Beam system. Soft-kill systems take a different route. Rather than physically destroying the aircraft, they interfere with the electronic architecture that keeps it airborne. Directional radio-frequency energy can disrupt command-and-control links, video feeds, telemetry and satellite-navigation signals such as GPS or other GNSS services. Depending on the drone and the nature of the disruption, the aircraft may be forced to land, return to its launch point or lose control. It is in this category that the T-SHUL BEAM system developed by Indian defence company IG Defence deserves attention. T-SHUL BEAM is a man-portable, directional counter-drone system designed for tactical deployment. Its multi-band radio-frequency architecture is intended to target several of the links on which unmanned aerial systems depend, including command-and-control, telemetry, video transmission and GNSS navigation. Its directional configuration allows an operator to concentrate electronic countermeasures on a particular aerial target rather than indiscriminately radiating energy across a large area. That matters on a battlefield where the warning time against a small UAV or first-person-view drone may be measured in seconds. The appeal of such a system is therefore not simply that it can counter a drone. It is that it can potentially bring counter-drone capability closer to the soldier and to the tactical edge. Large counter-UAS installations have their place, particularly around fixed and high-value assets. But forward units require systems that can move with them, be deployed rapidly and operate against small, low-cost unmanned platforms without imposing the logistical burden associated with conventional weapons. The T-SHUL BEAM’s significance also lies in its proposed integration with an artificial-intelligence-enabled battle-management architecture. IG Drones, the original equipment manufacturer, has stated that T-SHUL BEAM has been integrated with GRID, its indigenous AI-powered platform. The GRID architecture is intended to bring sensors, intelligence systems, unmanned platforms and command elements into a common operational framework. The attraction of such integration is obvious. Countering drones is increasingly less about a single weapon and more about the speed of the kill chain: detecting a threat, identifying it, deciding what response is appropriate and directing that response before the target disappears. An AI-enabled command architecture can potentially improve situational awareness, facilitate real-time threat detection and coordinate different systems operating simultaneously. This is particularly relevant as drone warfare evolves from isolated attacks towards increasingly complex and potentially swarming operations. A battlefield crowded with drones cannot be managed effectively if every sensor and weapon operates as a separate island. The advantage will increasingly belong to forces capable of turning disparate streams of information into a coherent picture and responding at machine speed. The T-SHUL BEAM’s reported demonstration at Pokhran represents another step in India’s attempt to build a domestic ecosystem spanning drones, counter-drones, artificial intelligence and electronic warfare. Counter-drone warfare is likely to be a recurring requirement rather than a niche capability. Importing every component of such an ecosystem would leave India vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions, technology restrictions and foreign-exchange pressures. Indigenous development, even when undertaken by relatively small private-sector companies, can broaden the country’s technological base and give the armed forces greater freedom to adapt systems to their operational requirements. Economics of the Contest Yet the real measure of any counter-drone system will ultimately be operational rather than promotional. Electronic warfare is inherently a contest between countermeasure and counter-countermeasure. Drone designers can alter frequencies, communications protocols, navigation methods and levels of autonomy. A system that is effective against one generation of drones may require modification against the next. The battlefield, in other words, will remain a technological arms race. The economics of the contest nevertheless favour directed-energy and electronic-warfare solutions. A conventional interceptor expends a missile or projectile against each target. A beam-based system can, subject to its power supply, engagement envelope and other operational constraints, engage targets without expending conventional ammunition. The marginal cost of an interception can consequently be dramatically lower. The beam also travels at effectively the speed of light, removing the flight time associated with kinetic interceptors. In densely populated areas or around sensitive infrastructure, bringing down a drone with a projectile can create its own hazards. Electronic disruption, when properly controlled, offers the possibility of neutralising the threat without sending an interceptor crashing back to earth. These advantages should not obscure the limitations. Soft-kill systems depend on the vulnerabilities of the target’s electronic architecture and may be less effective against increasingly autonomous drones that require fewer external communications. Weather, range, power availability, frequency management and the sophistication of an adversary's electronic countermeasures can all affect performance. No single technology is likely to provide a complete answer. The future of counter-drone warfare will therefore belong not to the beam alone but to layered defence combining. The emergence of systems such as T-SHUL BEAM suggests that India is beginning to build the technological pieces of that architecture at home. (The writer is a retired naval aviation officer and a defence and geopolitical analyst. Views personal.)

Credit Scores for Farmer Health

Writer: Parashram Patil
Parashram Patil
May 26
3 min read

India’s rural co-operatives are undergoing the biggest technological overhaul in their history. More than 61,000 Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) have now been integrated into a unified digital ERP platform under the Ministry of Co-operation, transforming once paper-bound village societies into data-driven financial hubs. PACS are no longer mere credit counters. Increasingly, they distribute fertilizers, run Jan Aushadhi centres, lease farm machinery and serve as the operating system of the rural economy.


Yet beneath this modernisation lies an old and largely ignored vulnerability. India’s agricultural-credit architecture has become adept at managing risks to crops, but not risks to cultivators themselves. Droughts, pest attacks and unseasonal rainfall are insured against. The body of the farmer, however, remains outside the balance sheet. That omission is becoming expensive.


Measuring Farmer Health

A growing body of thinking, described as the ‘Farmers Health Capital’ framework, argues that agricultural productivity cannot be measured purely through land, machinery and labour. Classical economics models farm output as a combination of technology, capital and labour:


Y=f(A,K,L)


But this assumes labour is mechanically constant. In reality, labour efficiency depends heavily on the physical condition of the worker. The revised framework therefore introduces a “health efficiency multiplier” modifying productivity into:


Y=f(A,K,L\times H)


Here, H represents the health stock of the cultivator. Under punishing heatwaves, pesticide exposure or chronic musculoskeletal strain, this stock depreciates rapidly. A farmer may physically work eight hours in a field during a 42°C heatwave, but the effective economic value of that labour may collapse by half.


This sounds abstract until one examines the financial consequences. Across rural India, many short-term loan defaults are triggered not by crop failures but by medical emergencies. When illness strikes a farming household, repayment schedules are often ‘hijacked,’ meaning money meant for servicing crop loans is redirected towards hospital bills and urgent treatment. The result is a silent leak in the co-operative credit system.


Traditional crop insurance protects against environmental shocks. It does little when the harvest succeeds but the cultivator collapses before reaching the mandi. A family that should have remained solvent suddenly becomes a non-performing asset (NPA) risk for its local PACS. As digitised co-operatives expand their lending operations, this human vulnerability threatens to scale with them.


That is why some policy thinkers including myself are proposing a new mechanism: health-linked credit scorecards embedded directly into the PACS digital infrastructure.


The idea is when farmers visit their local PACS to purchase inputs or manage seasonal credit, they could undergo rapid occupational-health assessments through digital interfaces integrated into the ERP system. The software would then generate a “Health Capital Rating” based on factors such as heat exposure, ergonomic strain and safe pesticide practices.


Farmers who adopt protective behaviours would earn “Health Capital Credits.” These could translate into tangible banking incentives, including lower interest rates on crop loans.


Low Cost

The attraction of the proposal lies partly in its low cost. Because the national PACS digital network already exists, advocates argue that the model could initially be tested as a software-layer upgrade rather than a major new welfare scheme. A pilot across high-stress agricultural belts such as Vidarbha could examine whether health-linked monitoring actually reduces default rates over a single crop cycle.


Climate change magnifies this distortion. Heatwaves do not merely reduce crop yields; they directly erode labour productivity. Under severe thermal stress, the human body diverts energy toward cooling itself, accelerating fatigue and impairing cognitive function. For smallholders already operating on thin margins, the biological cost of farming is becoming economically destabilising.


India’s co-operative ecosystem is uniquely positioned to operationalise such an approach. Large federations like IFFCO already possess deep distribution networks across rural India. Dairy unions modelled on Amul and sugar co-operatives in western India have a direct financial interest in maintaining the physical resilience of their producer base. A healthier cultivator is not merely a social good; he is a more reliable borrower, supplier and economic actor.


Critics may worry about creating a two-tier rural credit structure where physically vulnerable farmers are penalised rather than protected. Others will question whether the state should integrate biometric health data into financial decision-making at all.


Yet the central insight behind the proposal remains powerful. India’s rural-credit debate has long focused on waivers, subsidies and insurance. Far less attention has been paid to the biological fragility underlying agricultural finance itself. The computerisation of PACS offers an opportunity to rethink that equation.


(The writer is a member of Maharashtra Agriculture Price Commission. Views personal.)

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