India's Defence-Industrial Base and an Honest Reckoning With Self-Reliance

Indian defence production crossed one lakh crore rupees in value for the first time in the 2022-23 financial year and has continued climbing since, while defence exports have grown roughly eightfold over the past decade, reaching figures that would have seemed implausible when the Make in India programme was launched in 2014. These are not manufactured statistics; they reflect a real expansion of manufacturing capacity across public sector undertakings, the Ordnance Factory Board's successor companies, and a growing tier of private firms that now build everything from artillery ammunition to unmanned systems. Any honest assessment of Atmanirbhar Bharat in the defence sector has to start by acknowledging that something genuine has changed in how India builds military hardware. The harder, less comfortable question is what fraction of that growth represents indigenous design capability as opposed to indigenous manufacture of designs and critical components that remain foreign in origin.

Production Versus Design

This distinction matters enormously and is routinely elided in official communication. Licensed production, where an Indian factory assembles or manufactures a weapon system under contract with technology transfer from a foreign original equipment manufacturer, counts toward indigenisation statistics and rightly generates employment and industrial capability. But it is a different achievement from indigenous design, where Indian engineers conceive the system architecture, own the intellectual property and can modify the design without foreign sign-off. The Su-30MKI, built under license at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited's Nashik facility, has counted toward India's indigenous defence production figures for two decades, yet no one would describe it as an Indian design. The distinction is not pedantic: it determines whether India can upgrade a platform independently, export it without third-country consent clauses, or sustain it through a long war without foreign spares.

The Aero-Engine Problem

Nowhere is this gap more visible than in aero-engines, the single technology where India's indigenous ambitions have been most persistently frustrated. The Kaveri engine programme, launched by DRDO's Gas Turbine Research Establishment in 1989 to power the Tejas light combat aircraft, never achieved the thrust and reliability required, and the Tejas today flies on the American General Electric F404 engine, with the more powerful F414 slated for the Mark 2 variant under a deal that includes some technology transfer but stops well short of full design rights. This is not a failure unique to India; jet engine design sits among the handful of the most difficult manufacturing technologies in the world, mastered fully by perhaps four or five countries, and even China's indigenous WS-15 engine programme took decades and still trails Western equivalents in service life. But it does mean that India's combat aircraft fleet, regardless of how many airframes are assembled domestically, will remain dependent on foreign engine supply chains for the foreseeable future, a strategic vulnerability that no production statistic captures.

Where the Gains Are Real

Set against this, the gains in certain segments are substantial and deserve to be stated plainly. The Brahmos cruise missile, developed jointly with Russia but now manufactured with rising Indian content and exported to the Philippines in a landmark 2022 deal, represents genuine design collaboration rather than pure licensing. The Akash surface-to-air missile system, the Arjun tank's later variants, and India's naval shipbuilding, particularly destroyers and frigates built at Mazagon Dock and Garden Reach, show a defence-industrial base capable of complex systems integration even where individual subsystems, such as certain radars or engines, are still imported. Private sector entrants like Bharat Forge, Tata Advanced Systems and Adani Defence have brought manufacturing discipline and export orientation that the older public sector monopoly lacked, and this diversification is arguably a more durable structural change than any single platform's indigenisation percentage.

Electronics and the Hidden Dependency

The subtler dependency lies in electronics: radars, seekers, avionics and semiconductors embedded inside platforms that are otherwise counted as indigenous. India's semiconductor fabrication capacity remains negligible relative to the scale of the electronics content in modern weapons, and much of the chip-level dependency runs through supply chains that are themselves concentrated in a small number of countries, creating a vulnerability that is harder to see than an engine but potentially just as consequential during a prolonged conflict or an adversarial trade restriction. The government's recent push into semiconductor fabrication, through incentive schemes aimed at both civilian and defence applications, acknowledges this gap even if the payoff is years away.

A Realistic Vocabulary for Self-Reliance

The way out of this bind is not to abandon the self-reliance project, which has produced real and measurable gains in employment, export revenue and strategic flexibility, but to adopt a more honest public vocabulary that distinguishes indigenous design from licensed manufacture from component-level self-sufficiency, and reports progress against each separately rather than folding them into a single aggregate percentage that flatters the overall picture. Parliament's defence committee and independent think tanks such as the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses have periodically made this argument, and it deserves wider traction in public debate. India does not need to match every technology frontier to be strategically secure; even the United States imports critical minerals and components for its defence industry. What it needs is clarity about which dependencies are acceptable because they involve trusted partners and diversified supply, and which are dangerous because they concentrate risk in a single foreign relationship that could turn adversarial. That clarity, more than any single indigenisation target, should be the real measure of how the self-reliance project is judged a decade from now.