The Story Of Atmanirbharta In Defence

Will the embargo on import and carving out of a separate budget head for local procurement give impetus to indigenisation and self-reliance in a way that the measures taken in the past two decades have not? Amit Cowshish attempts an answer

- Amit Cowshish

Driven as much by the government’s ‘Atmanirbhar India’ agenda for economic revival, as by the strategic imperative of being self-reliant in defence production, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has prohibited import of 101 items. The list includes not just various types of ammunition which we should have started making in India long ago, but also weapon systems, radars, sonars, combat and transport vehicles, naval platforms, helicopters, and aircraft.

According to press release of August 9, 2020, the embargo will come into effect for 69 of these 101 items as early as in December 2020, for another 31 in a phased manner between December of 2021 and 2024, and for a solitary item – Long Range Land Attack Cruise Missile – in December 2025. Some of the items on the list like various variants of military trucks are already being made in India.

A separate budget head has also been carved out of the capital procurement budget for 2020-21 to cater for purchases from the domestic sources. Just to make it clear, capital procurement (or acquisition) budget is not a distinct budget head, but only a notional sub-set the ‘Capital Outlay on Defence Services’, which also includes allocation for acquisition of land, capital civil works, etc., none of which are considered to be a part of the putative capital procurement budget.

The press release proclaims that these measures are ‘a big step towards self-reliance in defence’ which ‘offers a great opportunity to the Indian defence industry to rise to the occasion to manufacture the items in the negative list by using their own design and development capabilities or adopting technologies designed by Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces in the coming years’.