BENGALURU: Maharashtra and Karnataka together account for nearly 27% of all registered drone owners in the country — excluding those owned by government departments and corporates — leaving behind most states, while Kerala and Gujarat come close to these two states.Acting on a long-pending demand from security experts the Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGA) decided to put in place regulation for drones, which also needed people to register such vehicles and also seek an OAN (Ownership Acknowledgement Number).While 19,553 drones have so far registered, a total of 16,503 OANs have been issued in the country, of which, 15,553 are issued to individuals, including 34 to people applying from outside of India.And, 4,159 of the individual drone owners are from two states: Maharashtra has 2,564 and Karnataka has 1,595. The two states even lead the table when it comes to corporates owning drones, with 34% of all corporates OANs. There are a total of 746 corporate OANs.Besides this 204 OANs have been issued to various state governments and their agencies. In this category Uttarakhand leads the table with 32, followed by Maharashtra (23) and Karnataka (13).And, of the 19,553 drones, most of them are micro drones (2kg and below). While 13,735 are micro drones, 2,808 are small drones, 18,32 are nano drones, 1,038 are large and 140 are medium.Further, the DGCA on Wednesday said that the first six green zones for drone operations near six metro cities have received the security clearance and are good to go. The regulator has given specific latitude and longitude coordinates where the drones can now be operated, and these are near Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Jaipur, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.“The green zones are circles with a 5 km radius—ground area around 80 sqkm—and all micro drones (2 kg and below) with a valid identification number can apply for an online permission artifact (OPA) on the digital sky platform (DSP) and fly in these green zones,” an official said, adding that the flying will have to be as per guidelines set by DGCA.While the announcement of the first phase of green zones is welcome, the regulator has not been able to release the red zones (where drones cannot fly) as per its initial plan. This is, as reported by TOI in February, because security agencies led by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) have raised concerns over making the sensitive “no-fly” zone public by indicating them on the maps of Digital Sky portal, which has been designed to enable drone flying.As part of the new rules, once drones — operator, manufacturer or remote pilot — are registered with Digital Sky, the portal was supposed to provide users a map that contains three zones that indicate where they could fly freely, where they just cannot fly and where they could fly only after obtaining certain clearances.This meant that the no-fly zones would be indicated in Red on the map. “This was seen as a concern as the IB felt that sensitive strategic locations would become public through this map, which could be a threat to national security,” an official said, adding a decision was made to release only the green zones.