Soldier lives matter

Borders are the hotline topic of any nation. There is always a conflict when it comes to border. Which country wishes to shrink its border willingly? In today's modern world, borders are the transition area from one society to another, one culture to another and one economy to another.

India shares border with many of its neighbouring countries out of which the longest is with Bangladesh. The border with Pakistan has always been in conflict right from independence. We had a war with our neighbour, China over the Aksai Chin region. In todays post-modern world of advanced technology, there is a need to modernise our borders with state of the art technology so that we are not bullied by our neighbours. This includes barbed electric fence with advanced detection systems and robots and drones to monitor in high altitude difficult weather and terrains.

The development of robots and drones to be deployed in border management becomes very crucial. A very small misunderstanding on any one side of the border might end some of our soldiers lives even when we are not at war. Life is very precious and more so for the people who protect our motherland and us. Even they have family and friends who count on them. Recognising this will lead us to feel the need to deploy robots and remote drones in place of soldiers in this era where border skirmishes are common.

Electronics and communication, Internet of Things(IoT), robotics, mechatronics, Artificial intelligence and related branches are well developed and by combining all these there is a possibility to create robots capable of carrying out tasks using artificial intelligence and send the data collected to other machines and robots through IoT. Further border protection can be enhanced by deploying UAV's and drones with military capability. For example, USA uses a military drone called predator to eliminate terrorists in Afghanistan. The operator is not physically present in the region of conflict. He sits at a remote place away from the conflict zone and operates the drone just like a video game. By converting an attack into a video game, we are definitely inviting danger and ethical concerns, but is a very effective tool which can be used ethically by limiting our functions to protect our borders and save our defence personnel from unnecessary suffering.

The GOI had constituted Shekatkar committee to review border defence in our country which has recommended modernisation of borders. The government should constitute a research team to develop technology for the same and also invite Public-private partnership to produce state of the art technology  and further promote the idea of Make in India.