Nagpur firm SDAL delivers 21 Nagastra-2 loitering munitions to Army

Solar Defence and Aerospace Limited (SDAL), a Nagpur-based company, has delivered 21 units of its Nagastra-2 loitering munition system to the Indian Army. The consignment left the company's factory on Thursday, with senior SDAL officials present. The handover is being described as one more step in India's push to build its own defence equipment, and it adds to the Army's capacity for precision strikes.

The company says the system passed technical trials in August 2026 at the Mahajan Field Firing Range, which is in Bikaner, Rajasthan. Army personnel watched how it performed. The system's operational parameters and its performance against electronic counter-countermeasure (ECCM) requirements were assessed in front of an Indian Army Board of Officers, and the result was successful. SDAL says the delivery went ahead only after this, and that the system is now ready to be deployed with the Army.

ECCM is the main selling point of Nagastra-2. It is built to keep working in an electronic warfare environment, where communication jamming, GPS jamming and spoofing can cripple unmanned and precision-strike systems. The company says the system has anti-jamming, anti-spoofing and multi-mode communication features. Its vision-based tracking and autonomous guidance are meant to let it follow a target even if GPS signals are lost.

Nagastra-2 can be used in two modes, recover-and-reuse and fire-and-forget. In the first mode its range is up to 25 km, and in the second it goes up to 50 km. It can remain in the air for up to 60 minutes. Its electro-optical payload has dual sensors that work by day and by night, and the system is designed to detect and track several kinds of targets, armoured vehicles among them.

For armoured targets, it carries an indigenously built tandem anti-tank warhead weighing 4 kg. The company says the warhead can defeat explosive reactive armour (ERA) and can penetrate up to 650 mm of rolled homogeneous armour (RHA). SDAL adds a caution that the actual effect depends on conditions and test parameters.

The company says the system has been designed with the demands of today's battlefield in mind, and that the delivery should help indigenous development of defence equipment as the armed forces look increasingly for home-built, technology-led systems.

This is not SDAL's first loitering munition contract with the Army. According to the company, it received an order in 2025 for about 450 Nagastra-1R systems. That version has a reusable launcher and a 360-degree gimbal camera, and a thermal camera can be fitted as an option for night operations. It uses proprietary encryption for video and telemetry links, and its targeting accuracy is stated to be a circular error probable (CEP) of two metres.

SDAL says Nagastra-1R has more than 80 per cent indigenous content. It has been tested at several locations, including Ladakh and Babina near Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh. With the Nagastra-2 delivery following the Nagastra-1R order, the Nagpur manufacturer is steadily widening its role as a supplier of home-built loitering munitions to the Army.