There are moments when a nation’s story flips pages so fast you can almost hear the printing press coughing: one day you are queuing for imports, the next you’re stamping “Made in India” on equipment that once arrived in crates from afar. That flip – from buyer to builder – is what we’re watching unfold in Indian defence manufacturing. It is not polite progress. It is impatient, noisy, unapologetic national ambition. And the numbers now sitting on the scoreboard make the point for those who still measure greatness in decimals.
India’s defence production surged to a record ₹1.27 lakh crore in FY 2023–24 – a leap that is not merely arithmetic, but a declaration: we will not outsource our security. This figure represents a 174% rise since 2014–15, and it is the clearest rebuke to the comfortable worldview that saw domestic industry as a poor cousin to foreign OEMs. This is homegrown muscle, honed and hardened.
Make no mistake: defence manufacturing is not a sentimental hobby. It is strategic economics. Defence exports crossing ₹21,083 crore in FY 2023–24 – thirty times what they were a decade ago – tell you two things. One, our factories can meet global standards; two, strategic relationships are now being shaped by what India sells, not just what it buys. When protective gear, Dornier aircraft, fast interceptor boats and even lightweight torpedoes wear an Indian tag, policy acquires teeth.
If you want proof that this is not a public-relations exercise, look at the ATAGS deal. After years of testing, India has moved to procure 307 Advanced Towed Artillery Gun Systems (155mm/52 calibre) along with 327 High Mobility 6×6 gun-towing vehicles – a contract signed with Bharat Forge and Tata Advanced Systems, worth roughly ₹6,900–7,000 crore. That’s not a paper parade; that’s artillery, traction, and logistics being built here, by Indians, for Indian regiments. The CCS approval and subsequent contracts mark the end of the era when heavy, critical artillery systems were treated as imports you prayed would arrive on time.
What has catalysed this shift? Policy courage, plain and simple. The government didn’t just market a slogan; it rewired procurement and policy – from Positive Indigenisation Lists that put teeth into local sourcing, to platforms like SRIJAN that have indigenised more than 14,000 items, and Positive Indigenisation Lists that cover roughly 3,000 items. Those lists are not checklist virtue signalling; they are the scaffolding on which a sovereign supply chain is being raised. The young engineers and private firms that were once shunted out of the sector are now centre-stage.
There’s also an intelligence to modernising defence: the battlefield is now as much about bytes as bullets. Initiatives like iDEX and SAMARTHYA are incubators of the future – AI, cyber-warfare capabilities, autonomous systems and indigenous weapon systems. The fight of tomorrow will be algorithmic; an enemy’s code will be as lethal as its artillery. India’s move to seed startups and tie academic labs to defence needs is both pragmatic and prophetic. We are designing not just hardware, but doctrine for a digital battlefield.
Numbers tell the policy story, but anecdotes prove its human cost and benefit. A factory in Pune making critical components, a small firm in Chennai building fire-control software, a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru developing an AI system for target recognition — these are the new arteries of national power. Each job created, each partnership formed with a global client, chips away at an old dependency. And as the defence budget swelled – from roughly ₹2.53 lakh crore in 2013–14 to ₹6.81 lakh crore in 2025–26; the finance simply followed the ambition. Investment begets capacity; capacity begets credibility.
Let us be candid: ambition without discipline is noise. Targets set by the Ministry – to reach ₹3 lakh crore in production and ₹50,000 crore in exports by 2029 – are audacious, but audacity is the raw material of national projects. Ambition must be matched with stringent quality control, export strategy, after-sales support and a realistic view of global competition. We must guard against vanity buys and ensure that Make in India produces systems that are maintainable in the field, interoperable with allies, and attractive to customers abroad.
There are challenges aplenty. Supply chains must mature; small suppliers must reach international quality standards; financing and risk-sharing will require imaginative policy. But these are soluble problems. What cannot be retrofitted is a lack of will. That, India now has in abundance.
This renaissance also changes geopolitics. Defence exports create friendships that are not transactional; they are strategic. When India sells equipment to friendly nations, it creates interoperability, dependence of a different and more resilient kind, and channels of influence that are less combustible than diplomatic notes. Our soft power gains a hard edge.
Critics will argue that self-reliance can sometimes mean protectionism. That is a valid caution. The right path is not autarky but calibrated autonomy – build the capability, keep the door open to best-in-class tech, and always make sure the Indian industry is winning because it is better, not merely because it is cheaper or shielded. Competition and collaboration are not enemies; they are twin tools of industrial maturity.
What we have after a decade of focus is not perfection, but trajectory. The sector’s growth – from marginal participation to meaningful exports, from kit that rusted in stores to kit that performs on parade and on mission – has rewritten the narrative. Soldiers will now go to battlefields with equipment that our engineers designed, tested, and produced. There is dignity in that.
At its heart, Make in India’s defence success is about reclamation. Reclaiming supply chains, reclaiming technology, reclaiming pride. The nation that once queued for spares will now queue to buy our systems. That is a reversal few would have predicted when the slogan first echoed through halls of power. But slogans don’t become history – steel, software, contracts and disciplined policy do.
So let us not sentimentalise this. Let us industrialise it. Let us harden ambition with competence. The next few years will determine whether ₹1.27 lakh crore is a peak or the first foothold on a steeper ascent to ₹3 lakh crore. If the past decade is any lesson, India will surprise the sceptics again – not with sweet rhetoric, but with the hum of factory lines and the quiet, unromantic work of engineers turning a country’s security into something we can genuinely call our own.
Make in India in defence is now a muscle, not a mantra. And a country that builds its armour builds its chances.
