DRDO Nishant

Overview

The DRDO Nishant (lit. 'Dawn') - is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) developed by India's Aeronautical Development Establishment (ADE), a branch of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) for the Indian Armed Forces. The Nishant UAV is primarily tasked with intelligence gathering over enemy territory and also for reconnaissance, training, surveillance, target designation, artillery fire correction, damage assessment, ELINT and SIGINT. The UAV has an endurance of four hours and thirty minutes. Nishant has completed development phase and user trials. However, further development of the project was cancelled after all of the four prototypes and production UAVs crashed due to various and unknown reasons.