Our Vision

The talent was neverthe problem.The platform was.

Nepal has the people. It needs the room, tools, and belief to build.

How we get there

Build the workforce Nepal does not yet have.

NAESL trains aerospace and UAV engineers, then puts their skills to work where Nepal needs them most: saving lives, strengthening public safety, and creating a domestic platform for innovation.

The four stages below turn that ambition into a practical path.

The long game

Explore how NAESL builds national capability.

The Skills Lab

Drone R&D Projects

Aerial vehicle over a mountain landscape

Government & Defence Partnership

National Pilot Programme

Why this matters for Nepal

Nepal repeatedly needs aerial capability it does not yet have the trained people to provide.

Nepal's geography and its recent history point to the same conclusion. Three areas make the case.

Emergency responders deploying a rescue drone after a landslide in Nepal

Collapsed homes and grieving residents after the 2015 Nepal earthquake

Aerial view of muddy flood channels cutting through dense Kathmandu neighbourhoods

Disaster response

Saving lives in a country built for disaster

Nepal sits on one of the world's most active fault lines and receives some of the most intense monsoon rainfall on Earth. The record is unambiguous:

The April 2015 Gorkha earthquake killed approximately 9,000 people, injured over 22,000, and displaced 2.8 million, the worst disaster Nepal had faced in over 80 years. Rescue teams took up to two weeks to reach some remote villages, by which point survival odds had collapsed.
In the 2024 monsoon season alone, floods and landslides killed roughly 250 people, displaced over 10,800 families, and caused an estimated NPR 46.7 billion in damage. More than 17,000 people required rescue, and over 30,000 security personnel were mobilized to find them.
Between 2016 and early 2025, Nepal recorded nearly 50,000 disaster incidents nationwide, fires, floods, landslides, and earthquakes, and the trend is worsening, not improving.

Thermal-imaging drones can locate survivors under rubble or debris in minutes rather than the hours or days ground teams currently need, and can reach collapsed hillsides, flooded valleys, and blocked highways that vehicles and search parties cannot. Nepal Army and Nepal Police currently have very few trained drone operators of their own. NAESL is built to close that specific gap: producing the engineers and operators who give search-and-rescue teams eyes in places they cannot otherwise reach, in time to matter.

Nepali engineers monitoring an unarmed UAV over Himalayan terrain

Border security

Monitoring what Nepal cannot currently see

Nepal's western border with India remains disputed across the Kalapani-Lipulekh-Limpiyadhura triangle, an area of roughly 372 square kilometres of high-altitude, largely inaccessible terrain.

Of the approximately 8,000 boundary pillars along the full Nepal-India border, over 1,200 are currently missing or damaged, and dozens of encroachment incidents remain undocumented simply because the terrain is too difficult to patrol on foot.

Reliable aerial monitoring and mapping, flown, maintained, and interpreted by Nepal's own trained engineers, gives Nepal's security and survey agencies an independent, evidence-based picture of its own frontier, rather than depending on foreign imagery or infrequent physical patrols.

A public-safety drone team working from a Kathmandu rooftop

Smoke rising from Nepal's Federal Parliament during civil unrest in Kathmandu

Protesters carrying Nepal flags amid smoke on a crowded Kathmandu street

A police line facing protesters as tear gas crosses a Kathmandu street

Public safety

Situational awareness, not escalation

In September 2025, anti-corruption protests in Kathmandu turned into the deadliest public unrest in Nepal's modern history: at least 19 people were killed and over 300 injured on a single day, with the toll rising to 76 dead and more than 2,000 injured nationwide over the following week.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both documented that security forces on the ground had almost no real-time visibility into crowd density, movement, or escalation risk beyond what officers could see directly in front of them, and that force was often used in situations where non-violent options had not been exhausted.

This is precisely the kind of failure that aerial situational awareness is built to prevent, not by arming anyone, but by giving commanders a live overhead picture of crowd movement, identifying safe dispersal routes, and coordinating medical evacuation before a crisis escalates to lethal force. Nepal currently has neither the domestic UAV capacity nor the trained operators to provide that. Building both is part of NAESL's long-term mandate.

The common thread

Disaster response, border security, and public safety are three different problems. They share one bottleneck.

Nepal has almost nobody trained to design, build, operate, or maintain the aerial systems each of them requires. NAESL's goal is simple: train the engineers today who give Nepal the capability to protect its own people tomorrow.

Join us, and be part of building it. →

Loading NAESL

Saving lives in a country built for disaster

Nepal sits on one of the world's most active fault lines and receives some of the most intense monsoon rainfall on Earth. The record is unambiguous:

The April 2015 Gorkha earthquake killed approximately 9,000 people, injured over 22,000, and displaced 2.8 million, the worst disaster Nepal had faced in over 80 years. Rescue teams took up to two weeks to reach some remote villages, by which point survival odds had collapsed.

In the 2024 monsoon season alone, floods and landslides killed roughly 250 people, displaced over 10,800 families, and caused an estimated NPR 46.7 billion in damage. More than 17,000 people required rescue, and over 30,000 security personnel were mobilized to find them.

Between 2016 and early 2025, Nepal recorded nearly 50,000 disaster incidents nationwide, fires, floods, landslides, and earthquakes, and the trend is worsening, not improving.

Monitoring what Nepal cannot currently see

Nepal's western border with India remains disputed across the Kalapani-Lipulekh-Limpiyadhura triangle, an area of roughly 372 square kilometres of high-altitude, largely inaccessible terrain.

Of the approximately 8,000 boundary pillars along the full Nepal-India border, over 1,200 are currently missing or damaged, and dozens of encroachment incidents remain undocumented simply because the terrain is too difficult to patrol on foot.

Situational awareness, not escalation

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both documented that security forces on the ground had almost no real-time visibility into crowd density, movement, or escalation risk beyond what officers could see directly in front of them, and that force was often used in situations where non-violent options had not been exhausted.