On a Sunday afternoon in September 2025, lightning struck a storage tank at a port-side fuel facility in Visakhapatnam. The tank’s roof caved in and its contents caught fire. Ten fire engines raced to the site, and the Navy flew a helicopter from INS Dega to drop water and foam on the blaze. Officials later conceded it could have been a catastrophe: a refinery and other fuel terminals stood close by.
The episode captures something Indian safety planners rarely say aloud. An air base, a civil airport, a refinery and a sprawling warehouse look nothing alike from the road. To a fire, they are nearly identical: large volumes of fuel, enclosed spaces that trap heat, and smoke that can kill long before the flames arrive.
The armed forces have spent the past few years rethinking how to fight exactly these fires. One credential has made that shift possible: clearance from the Directorate General of Quality Assurance (DGQA).
Same hazards, different uniforms
An air base stores aviation fuel in bulk, parks aircraft in hangars and keeps munitions nearby. A civil airport has the same fuel farms and hangars, with thousands of passengers added. A refinery processes hydrocarbons under heat and pressure; when a crude distillation unit at the Visakhapatnam refinery caught fire in May 2021, personnel from the Eastern Naval Command worked alongside the refinery’s own crews and state fire services to put it out.
Warehouses add their own twist. When Delhi’s fire service inducted remote-controlled robots in 2022, its director said they were meant for godowns and large factories where crews cannot know what is stacked inside. About a month later, one was used extensively at a Badli godown full of plastic granules, and nobody was hurt.
In every case, the most dangerous moments are the first ones, when responders must get close to something that might explode, collapse or choke them.
The machine in front of the person
The military’s answer has been to send a machine in first. The Navy has taken 50 unmanned firefighting vehicles, trialled aboard the aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. The Air Force has ordered 80 for airbases, maintenance hangars, fuel storage areas and ammunition facilities, and demonstrated the system at its Vayu Shakti 2026 exercise in Pokhran in February. In January, the Army signed a ₹62-crore contract for 18 more, bound for ammunition depots and fuel storage sites across its cantonments.
The machine behind all these orders is the FF Bot, built by Ahmedabad-based Swadeshi Empresa Private Limited, India’s indigenous firefighting robotics company. It is a remotely operated ground vehicle with a foam jet and a fog-water monitor, plus optical and thermal cameras that let operators find hotspots through dense smoke while staying clear of the heat and any blast.
Why DGQA clearance matters
DGQA is the body that validates quality and compliance standards for equipment supplied to the defence forces. Its clearance is not a formality. It tells the Army, Navy and Air Force that a product and its maker meet the standards they expect, before the equipment goes near an ammunition depot or a fuel bay.
For Swadeshi Empresa, an iDEX-first, MoD-backed startup, the clearance puts a young company on the same footing as established defence suppliers. The technology is developed in-house, from Indian R&D, in step with Atmanirbhar Bharat in defence. Its journey through iDEX and SPRINT shows how the defence ministry’s innovation programmes can carry a startup from prototype to approved supplier.
The record behind the clearance is one of delivery. Swadeshi Empresa completed the Indian Air Force’s emergency procurement order, which carried a 12-month schedule, in 11 months. Every major delivery has come within the stipulated timeline or ahead of it.
Crossing the fence
These are not demonstration systems. The robots are operationally deployed with the Indian armed forces and have proved themselves in live fire incidents. The FF Bot was used during a major fire at the Visakhapatnam refinery, and officials have named power stations, airports, fuel storage sites and disaster response as natural civilian uses. Several state fire departments have also deployed the company’s robots during live emergencies. In May 2025, Delhi Fire Service personnel demonstrated its ARMOUR robotic water-mist vehicle for Chief Minister Rekha Gupta at the Delhi Secretariat, as her government set aside ₹110 crore for new firefighting equipment.
Officials stress that such robots support firefighters rather than replace them. The machine enters the worst of it first, sends back live pictures and knocks the fire down so crews can follow safely.
Four lessons worth borrowing
First, standoff before exposure. The forces’ working rule is that nobody should walk into a burning fuel bay or munitions store if a machine can go instead. Refineries, airport fuel farms and large warehouses should write that assumption into their emergency plans, with equipment staged on site rather than across the city.
Second, plan to absorb the hit. Vayu Shakti tested damage control alongside strike power, on the premise that readiness means surviving a blow and continuing to operate. For an airport or a refinery, that is simply business continuity: how fast can the runway or the unit return to service?
Third, trust equipment that has already been tested hard. The Army bought a Navy-proven robot under rules that let one service adopt an iDEX product validated by another. State fire services, airport operators and refineries could likewise treat DGQA clearance and rigorous military trials as a head start instead of beginning every evaluation from scratch.
Fourth, train together. Visakhapatnam shows the Navy already backs up civilian crews when fuel burns. Joint drills on common equipment would make that cooperation routine rather than improvised.
India’s refineries sit beside its cities, its airports share runways with air bases, and its warehouses crowd up against homes. The fire problem is shared. The solutions can be too. From indigenous R&D to DGQA clearance, timely delivery and field deployment, Swadeshi Empresa’s journey shows that Indian industry can build and deliver mission-critical technology for the nation’s forces.
