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In a village near the coast of Odisha, Bhadrak, the sky was not only the sky. For Bodhisattwa Sanghapriya, an IIM Sambalpur student, it was the locus where missiles rose from what was then Wheeler Island, later named Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island. From his home, he could feast his eyes on launches with his naked eyes from the Integrated Test Range across the water. The sight stayed with him.
Years later, when Sanghapriya and his student team built a rocket of their own, few believed they could do it. They had no dedicated rocket laboratory, no conventional launch platform and little institutional support. Yet the rocket was built and launched.
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The handiwork drew national attention. In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to the students' work on his radio programme Mann Ki Baat.
The interlude also caught the attention of Isro, the then chairman K Sivan, sent a team to examine how a group of engineering students had built and launched a rocket without the facilities normally associated with such a project.
What was expected to be a brief 30-minute interaction became, according to Sanghapriya, a six-hour technical discussion. The scientists examined the students' work and questioned them about how they had designed and built the rocket.
For the young engineer, it was a turning point. The boy who had watched rockets rise from the Odisha coast was now sitting before scientists from India's space programme, explaining how he and his team had built one themselves.
He did not look back.
Born in Bhadrak, Odisha in 1996 other than floods and cyclones, a young boy had rockets in space to witness with naked eyes.
Was drawn to machines long before he knew where that interest would lead. His father was a teacher who ran a science club from home, and the young Sanghapriya grew up among discarded electronics, science kits, astronomy activities and other children curious about how things worked.
When floods came to the village, the problem the community often faces was people often received warnings too late. As he says, "By the time newspapers reached the cyclone had already wrapped up, nothing left to be aware of."
As a child, he gathered friends and used discarded electronic parts to build what he describes as a community radio station. It happened at the age of 6.
Sanghapriya intended to put about information on floods and weather.
On another occasion, after a pest attack damaged crops, he and his friends used traditional knowledge documented by the National Innovation Foundation to develop and distribute an organic formulation.
The boy was already trying to answer a question that would follow him into adulthood: if a problem could be understood, could something be built to solve it?
By the time he entered Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology in Burla, engineering was expected to lead to laboratories, examinations and, eventually, a job. Sanghapriya found something else.
He joined robotics, automobile and coding clubs and began making devices of his own. His LinkedIn profile records projects ranging from a water-control device and a smart watch to a badminton-playing robot.
With a dream in his eyes, an engineering student from Odisha approached his college Vice-Chancellor, seeking support to build a rocket. The Vice-Chancellor laughed, telling him that the institution had an annual budget of only Rs 90 lakh, while the student was asking for Rs 15 crore. He was then barred from entering the laboratory.
"I asked him to help me to listen to my idea instead of any support. I was barred from entering the lab," Sanghapriya told India Today.
But the setback did not end his pursuit. He turned to his friends for help and, with the resources they could gather, built a rocket in the college field and launched it.
The district magistrate allowed him to launch it, despite the restrictions then governing the flying of objects above one kilometre.
Sanghapriya later recalled of the magistrate: โHe was courageous enough. When the ISRO people asked who had given the permission, I took his name. He went beyond and supported the matter, taking a stand for me even when it could have affected his own job.โ
The launch succeeded and drew the attention of ISRO scientists, who came to examine how the students had managed to build and launch a rocket without a conventional laboratory or launch platform.
The experiment succeeded and soon drew national attention. Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned the students' work on Mann Ki Baat, while ISRO scientists came to examine the project.
The society taboo did not end here. Then came an exhibition in Ahmedabad.
A visitor, hearing that the young exhibitor was a first-year student from Odisha, questioned whether he had actually built the device himself. Sanghapriya says the remark stayed with him.
He decided that he would one day build something for the first time in the country.
He did not yet know what that thing would be.
The answer came when he read about ISRO's 2017 mission that placed 104 satellites in orbit, including satellites developed by student teams.
He and a group of fellow students first resolved to build a satellite of their own. But after learning of the time and money such a project could require, they changed course.
โIf ISRO has the rocket,โ he recalls asking his team, โwhy do we need ISRO? Let us build the rocket.โ
And so the satellite became a rocket.
There was little money and, by his account, little institutional encouragement.
Sanghapriya assembled a team of about 40 students after speaking to hundreds of potential members. When the students sought help from ISRO, they did not receive the response they hoped for. He has recalled being told that a serious space-grade project could require years of research and substantial funding.
The university, meanwhile, did not give the team the laboratory access it sought.
So they began elsewhere.
They started with small experiments and, in his telling, even went to a fireworks shop to understand the rudiments of rocket propulsion. The project failed repeatedly. More than a hundred attempts came before success, he says.
Eventually, the student team launched a rocket to about 16,000 feet above ground level. Sanghapriya and VSSUT's own records describe the project as the โAsia's first multipurpose student rocketโ; his LinkedIn account says the achievement entered the Limca Book of Records.
The unco part of the story was perhaps how the students acquired their knowledge. Sanghapriya says the team contacted nearly 2,000 scientists and engineers around the world through Facebook, seeking advice on propulsion, avionics, computational fluid dynamics and other parts of the project.
The rocket eventually drew the attention of ISRO. VSSUT records and Sanghapriya's own account say the project subsequently came under ISRO's support, and an ISRO-VSSUT Space Innovation Centre was established on the campus.
A student experiment had thus acquired an institution of its own.
When he completed his engineering degree in 2018, Sanghapriya did not take the conventional route into employment. Instead, he and his associates began building a company around drones.
That company became IG Drones, co-founded by Sanghapriya and Om Prakash. Forbes lists the Noida-based company as having developed drones for mapping, surveillance and agricultural spraying, with its JAGA platform among its principal products. The company later moved further into defence technology.
Today, Sanghapriya is the founder and chief executive of IG Defence. He also holds an MBA from IIM Sambalpur, while VSSUT records identify him as a member of its 2018 graduating class.
The company's work has since moved from civilian applications towards surveillance, tactical systems, counter-UAS technology and autonomous strike platforms.
Its JAGA UAV, a vertical-take-off-and-landing drone, has been procured by the Ministry of Defence for surveillance.
Janes reported that the system can operate without a conventional runway and carries a range of sensors.
The change in scale is striking. The boy who once worked with discarded electronics now leads a company developing systems for India's defence forces. IG Defence lists surveillance and reconnaissance, tactical and strategic UAS and counter-UAS systems, autonomous strike platforms and defence AI among its capabilities.
Sanghapriya has also said that his company's systems were deployed during Operation Sindoor, including kamikaze systems.
The business itself has been growing beyond its original base. Sanghapriya has written of taking IG Drones from Sambalpur to markets across India and, subsequently, towards international expansion.
In 2024, he said the company had more than 200 employees, had served more than 200 clients and completed more than 500 projects.
The ambition is now larger than the village, the university or even the Indian market.
Sanghapriya speaks of building Indian drone technology for the world.
There is a curious symmetry in the journey.
The child who once stood close to the Bay of Bengal and watched rockets disappear into the sky did not become the scientist he had imagined. He became something else: an engineer, organiser and entrepreneur who gathered people around difficult problems.
The rocket was built without the laboratory he had sought. The company, too, was begun without the certainty of a market before it. The bus he missed, however, brought him to another which carried him farther than he had then imagined. โOur objective is to build the best drones for India and its allies,โ he says.
To serve the motherland remains the purpose which Bodhisattwa Sanghapriya has set before himself, and in that direction he intends to continue.
The sky, however, remained the same. Only the machines have changed and now have become the nightmare of India's adversary.
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