Sixty-Three Per Cent In A Year: India’s Defence Exports Outrun Their Own Target
India’s defence exports grew by nearly 63 per cent last financial year, leaving them within a third of a target set for 2029 and on course to clear it well before then. The production target for the same year is the far harder one: it requires an industry that has been growing at about 18 per cent a year to keep that up, without pause, for three more
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| Image Source: PIB India |
The arithmetic separates them. Production reached a record 1.78 trillion rupees in the year to March 2026, up from 1.51 trillion the year before and 1.27 trillion the year before that. Reaching 3 trillion by 2029 needs about 19 per cent growth every year, marginally above the pace already being set. Exports, by contrast, rose from 236 billion rupees to 384 billion in a single year, a jump of 62.66 per cent. Getting from there to 500 billion requires about 9 per cent a year. Indian defence products now reach more than 80 countries.
Beneath the targets, Singh set out where the government intends to let private firms into programmes the state has run alone. He named the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft, India’s fifth-generation stealth fighter project, along with propulsion systems, the Advanced Towed Artillery Gun System, artillery ammunition and shipbuilding, and said the openings extended to smaller companies, startups and universities. Propulsion is the most pointed of these: India has never built a fighter engine of its own and its combat aircraft fly on imported ones. One of the two preparatory roundtables held before the dialogue was devoted to it.
The most unusual passage of his address was a caution aimed at his own armed forces. The services must remain stakeholders in research, he said, because their battlefield experience shapes priorities — but research steered too closely by what commanders currently want will solve only the problems they have already identified. “R&D must have the freedom to question established assumptions, pursue unconventional ideas and discover technologies whose applications may not be immediately apparent,” he said, calling for operational needs to inform research without directing it.
His reasoning rested on how warfare has changed. Battlefields now extend into space, cyberspace and the digital domain, he said, the line between conventional and unconventional conflict is blurring, and inexpensive drones and autonomous systems are proving capable of threatening far costlier platforms. The capacity to innovate quickly, manufacture at scale and replace losses, he argued, now matters as much as owning advanced weapons — a conclusion drawn across the world’s recent conflicts.
He defined self-reliance more demandingly than the slogan usually implies: the knowledge to design a platform, the technology to build it, the intellectual property to improve it and the ability to sustain it across its service life. He called this technological sovereignty, and said it was not a withdrawal from the world. Future partnerships, he said, should move past procurement, licensed manufacture and transfers of technology towards co-development and co-production, with Indian firms involved in design, given access to critical technologies and a share of intellectual property, and placed in global supply chains.
Singh also urged exporters to sell maintenance, repair, training and logistics alongside equipment, arguing that each sale should anchor a lasting relationship. He pointed to the restructuring of the state Ordnance Factory Board into seven public-sector companies, the defence industrial corridors, and the ministry’s designation of 2025 as a year of reforms.
The two-day dialogue, which ends on Wednesday, was attended by the Chief of Integrated Defence Staff, Air Marshal Tejinder Singh, and foreign delegates. The institute’s director general, Sujan R Chinoy, said it had also convened an inaugural ASEAN-India defence think tank forum.