Modi 3.0: How Defence Self-Reliance Is Central To Viksit Bharat Vision

Last Updated:June 05, 2026, 15:47 IST

The question for 2047 is not whether India can become a serious defence manufacturing power. It already is one. The task now is to keep building.

There is a question that does not get asked often enough in discussions about India’s 2047 ambitions: can a country become a developed nation while depending on foreign suppliers for the weapons its soldiers carry?

The honest answer is, probably not. And that, more than any policy document, is the real logic behind the defence self-reliance push that has become one of the defining economic and security projects of the Modi government.

The Starting Point Was Uncomfortable

Ten years ago, India was the world’s largest arms importer. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute had India topping global import charts for years running. Roughly 60 to 70 per cent of military equipment was sourced from abroad, principally from Russia, France, Israel, and increasingly, the United States. Defence exports were negligible, sitting below Rs 1,000 crore annually.

The Arjun tank had been in development for decades. The Tejas fighter had been flying in prototype form since 2001 but was nowhere near squadron service. Private companies were largely shut out of what was effectively a government monopoly on defence production.

This was not a minor inefficiency. It was a structural vulnerability. Every platform India operated came with a foreign supply chain for spares, ammunition, and upgrades. Diplomatic friction with a supplier country, or simply a shift in that country’s foreign policy, could ground an aircraft or idle a fleet.

Why Self-Reliance Is A Strategic Argument First

The case for defence indigenisation is sometimes framed as industrial policy, and sometimes as job creation. Both are true, but neither is the primary motivation. The more fundamental argument is about what happens during a conflict.

Operation Sindoor was the first real test of how far India’s defence modernisation had actually come. Without crossing the Line of Control or the international boundary, Indian forces struck terrorist infrastructure and eliminated multiple threats. What stood out beyond the tactical execution was the seamless integration of indigenous systems into the operation.

Companies like IdeaForge had spent years building quietly; their drones were already in service before the operation began. What Sindoor revealed was how that preparation had stacked up: surveillance UAVs, loitering munitions, and counter-drone systems. The unmanned layer was not assembled in a hurry. It had been placed there deliberately. That only works if the supply chain is yours.

Globally, the same lesson has been playing out in sharper form. Russia’s war in Ukraine exposed just how quickly wars consume munitions and how few countries actually have the industrial depth to sustain a prolonged conflict. Ukraine itself has been heavily dependent on the pace of Western deliveries. Sanctions regimes on Russia, Iran, and others have repeatedly demonstrated that technology dependency can be weaponised. India, with unresolved border disputes on two fronts and a neighbourhood that is rarely quiet, cannot afford that kind of exposure.

What The Policy Architecture Actually Looks Like

The government has built its indigenisation push on several interlocking mechanisms, most of which were either created or significantly accelerated after 2014. The Positive Indigenisation Lists are perhaps the most direct instrument: items that must now be sourced domestically. Over 500 items have been notified across multiple lists, ranging from simple components to artillery guns, helicopters, and naval vessels. The intent is to create a guaranteed domestic market and, by extension, compel domestic production to rise to meet it.

Defence Acquisition Procedure reforms now favour Indian vendors. Companies that design and build in India get purchase preference over those that assemble foreign parts. Two Defence Industrial Corridors were set up: one through Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra, and Aligarh, and the other through Chennai, Coimbatore, and Hosur, bringing manufacturers, suppliers, and testing facilities into the same geography.

FDI limits in defence were raised to 74 per cent under the automatic route, and to 100 per cent with government approval. For most of India’s history, the sector was closed to outside capital. That has changed. iDEX, launched in 2018, took a different approach for early-stage companies: startups pitch against a defined defence problem, receive funding to develop a solution, and if the product works, the forces procure it.

The Hardware That Has Changed The Picture

The Tejas LCA is in squadron service with the Indian Air Force. Two Mark 1A squadrons, comprising 83 aircraft, are on order at roughly Rs 48,000 crore. It is an Indian-designed, Indian-built fighter, and its indigenous content has been growing. The Mark 2 and the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft are in development. The Akash surface-to-air missile system has been deployed by both the Army and the Air Force and is now being exported. Pinaka is in service and being sold abroad. Dhanush, the 155mm artillery gun, is in production. The Prachand light combat helicopter entered service in 2022. ATAGS set a world record in range trials, crossing 48 kilometres.

On the naval side, INS Vikrant, the first aircraft carrier built entirely in India, was commissioned in 2022. Destroyers, frigates, and submarines are coming out of Indian shipyards. The hardware exists and is in service. A decade ago, most of it did not.

Defence Exports: A Number That Did Not Exist Before

In 2013-14, India’s defence exports were under Rs 1,000 crore. By 2025-26, they had crossed Rs 38,000 crore. That is a nearly fortyfold increase in just over a decade. The government has set a target of Rs 50,000 crore by 2028-29.

Export destinations now include Armenia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Egypt, and several others. BrahMos, the supersonic cruise missile jointly developed with Russia, has been sold to the Philippines. Akash is being actively marketed. Dornier aircraft, ammunition, and radar systems have found buyers across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

This matters beyond the revenue. A country that exports defence technology is, in part, exporting strategic relationships. It creates dependencies in the other direction: buyers need spares, training, and upgrades from the seller. India is beginning to accumulate those relationships in its neighbourhood and beyond, which is a form of soft power that pure import dependence could never have generated.

Startups Are Now In The Picture

Five years ago, a defence startup in India was a curiosity. Today, there are over 600 of them, and the armed forces are buying from them. The shift began with Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX), which the government launched in 2018. The model was simple: startups pitch solutions to military problems, get funded to develop them, and if the product works, the forces procure it. By early 2025, the armed forces had procured 43 items from iDEX participants worth over Rs 2,400 crore.

Drones are no longer support systems. Indian startups have moved into surveillance UAVs, loitering munitions, counter-drone systems, and autonomous underwater vehicles, areas that were once dominated by foreign suppliers.

The government added ADITI on top of iDEX, a focused scheme for deep technology with grants of up to Rs 25 crore per project, covering semiconductors, quantum systems, and cyber capabilities. QuBeats, a quantum technology startup, received funding under ADITI to build a GPS-free navigation system for the Navy, designed for situations where an adversary jams satellite signals. That kind of problem would never have reached a small company before 2018. Now, it is being solved by one.

Where India Is Still Stuck

Some of these gaps have been building for decades. The jet engine is the most obvious one. The Kaveri programme has been under development since the 1980s, was formally delinked from the Tejas in 2008, and never entered operational service. The Tejas flies on a GE engine. The airframe comes from Bengaluru, the missile from Hyderabad, but the engine still comes from abroad. That is not a recent problem. It is a structural weakness that has accumulated over time.

Research spending has followed the same pattern. India puts significantly less of its defence budget into R&D. Drones, radars, and missiles all need advanced semiconductors. India does not make them. That supply chain runs through Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States, and military-grade chips are not coming out of Indian fabs yet.

Accountability is where the gap is most visible. HAL took 17 years to deliver 40 Tejas aircraft. The Mark 1A order was signed in 2021 for 83 aircraft, and deliveries have already slipped past the original 2024 timeline. Despite repeated delays, there is little evidence that schedule overruns have resulted in meaningful contractual accountability. Timelines slip, orders wait, and the Air Force manages with what it has.

The AMCA programme has now been opened to private consortia. Tata Advanced Systems, an L&T-led group, and a Bharat Forge consortium are in contention. The AMCA programme is expected to give private industry a far larger role than any previous Indian fighter project. Whether private firms are held to stricter timelines remains to be seen. That is the real test.

What 2047 Looks Like From Here

The Viksit Bharat vision is, at its core, a convergence of three things: economic scale, technological capability, and strategic autonomy. Defence self-reliance connects all three.

A large defence manufacturing base creates high-skill industrial employment. A defence export industry generates foreign exchange and strategic relationships. A military that can sustain itself from domestic production does not need to calibrate its decisions around the preferences of foreign suppliers.

What Modi’s government has done is shift the underlying logic — from a buyer’s mindset to a builder’s one. That does not show up in a single contract or a single platform. It shows up in who is getting the work, what they are building, and how fast the ecosystem around them is growing.

Ten years ago, none of this existed in any meaningful form. Today, it does. The question for 2047 is not whether India can become a serious defence manufacturing power. It already is one. The task now is to keep building.

About the Author

Vallari Parashar

Vallari Parashar is a Senior Sub Editor at News18. She writes on geopolitics, defence, and strategic affairs

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