Since independence, India has been a net importer of defence products mainly from its trusted and strategic ally, Russia. Although India has set up a large number of Public Sector Undertaking (PSUs) for the production of a variety of defence products, they were never able to upgrade, update and align themselves with the evolving cutting-edge technology.
As a result, India had to procure various defence products from Russia, Israel, France, the UK, and in the past two decades from the United States as well. India imported both technology and hardware, where technology was used for domestic manufacturing of defence hardware and equipment for the three organs of the Indian Armed Forces.
After taking over as Prime Minister, Narendra Modi exhorted all defence PSUs to accelerate, upgrade, and spur up to tap all available possibilities of not only replacing existing imports but scaling up to exports to world markets.
India’s emergence as an exporter of defence equipment and hardware in a short period of time is credited to factors such as liberalization in export policies, practices, and regime. The government has changed the export policy, allowing a level-playing field to both public and private companies as the new export policy is being streamlined to grant permission with the same set of procedures, without discriminating between the public and private companies.
Defence exports are not only allowed but promoted aggressively with the involvement of trade-related institutions and the Indian missions abroad. The Lines of Credit are offered to neighbouring countries to procure defence equipment and hardware from India. Defence exports rose from £ 194.1 million in 2014-15 to £911.6 million in 2019-20. With exports to more than 84 countries, India now finds mention in the lists of defence equipment exporting nations.
According to the E-booklet titled “20 reforms in 2020” released by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh highlighting the major reforms undertaken by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in 2020, also mentioned that the defence exports expanded to more than 84 countries. India’s defence ministry put out a list of more than 100 items of defence hardware that the three services will procure from domestic vendors in a bid to promote military equipment manufacturing in the country.
“This will give further boost to indigenisation (Atmanirbhar Bharat programme) with active participation of public and private sector for fulfilling the twin objectives of achieving self-reliance and promoting defence exports. All the items mentioned in the list will now be procured from indigenous sources as per provisions given in Defence Acquisition Procedure (DAP) 2020," a statement from the defence ministry said.
