The Long And Winding Road To Make In India

The DDPP 2018 aims to spawn a home-grown weapons industry by 2025, but where is the ecosystem?

- Manish Kumar Jha

INDIA RANKS FOURTH in an index that tracks global military power in terms of available firepower, armed forces personnel and diversity of weapons available. The criteria used in the rankings to determine military strength include natural resources, local industry, geographical features and available manpower. Incidentally, India is also the largest arms importer, accounting for close to 15 per cent of the global arms trade.

As a matter of fact, India’s arms imports shot up by 24 per cent between 2013 and 2017, going by statistics of the think-tank, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Domestic production of military hardware is at present confined to a cluster of nine defence public sector undertakings (DPSUs) and 39 ordnance factories, controlled by the Union Ministry for Defence, which together account for less than 40 per cent of the military hardware supplies of the Indian Armed Forces.

The Draft Defence Production Policy (DDPP) 2018 strives to change the scenario. It aims to make the world’s fourth largest military power self-reliant in defence production as well. The DDPP attempts to create a policy environment to lure private sector players and global arms manufacturers to set up production bases for military equipment on Indian soil.

The draft policy identifies 13 sets of weapons systems, including fighter jets, helicopters, warships, missile systems, ammunition and explosives, land systems and electronics that could be developed and manufactured in India by 2025.

Should the DDPP targets fructify, domestic production and sales of military equipment would be worth $26 billion by 2025, of which a fifth or $5 billion, would be for the export market. The DDPP also aims to make India a global leader in Artificial Intelligence and cyberspace technologies. In short, it strives for indigenisation of 75 per cent of defence production in half a decade, which provokes the poser: is it feasible?