Abstract Construction stakeholders have implied and stated responsibility and confronts to provide safe working environment at their project sites. In recent years, the construction industry has been adopting and using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a possible alternative for monitoring, inspecting and implementing construction safety management plans. However, UAV is still latest technology to the Indian construction industry to manage safety. Therefore, the study aims to acquire stakeholders’ awareness of adopting UAVs in the Indian construction industry. To achieve this, the study is performed in two stages. In the first stage, awareness for adopting UAVs among stakeholders is evaluated based on 107 interviews with engineers, managers, contractors, clients, consultants, researchers, and academicians. The results indicate that 73.6% of stakeholders are aware of the UAVs. In the second phase, 24 aspects (eight applications, eight benefits, and eight challenges) influencing the adoption of UAVs are identified from the literature. Then, these aspects are ranked by using the relative importance index (RII) method. Thus, the results can be utilized as an evidence base to promote UAV use in the Indian construction sector. Outcomes of study can be useful to formulate the safety policy for using UAV based on their operating issues and challenges. Further, the results can be used to develop a framework to study the feasibility of using UAVs in the safety management plan of a particular construction project.