India is writing a new playbook for deep tech, and its regulators are in the room

In most countries, when a regulator shows up at your office, somebody is in trouble. At ePlane Company, a flying taxi startup in Chennai, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation has done something altogether different: it has moved in, posted officers to the startup’s own facility, and put them in the room for weekly development meetings where they watch prototypes take shape and help write airworthiness rules for an aircraft that does not yet carry paying passengers.

The startup was founded by Professor Satya Chakravarthy out of IIT Madras, a man who has spent decades studying how things fly and whom a fellow founder in the drone space once described as a “god” in aerospace. In 2021, after years of running wind tunnels and training engineers, Chakravarthy went on sabbatical to build a flying taxi. He started late, years behind the likes of US-based Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation, with a fraction of their capital, and what he could not afford on top of all that was to build the technology first and then wait for the rules to catch up.

“In our case, we cannot get the technology developed and then wait for the policy to catch up. Airspace is highly regulated. If you have to take off, you need airspace permissions,” he says. “Ultimately when you make an aircraft and start commercialising it, you need to have the regulations by your side.”