India is committed to working toward achieving a USD 26 billion defence industry by 2025, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said on Monday.
Speaking at 'India Rising Conference' here, Singh said that with an aim to reduce "dependency" on import, the draft Defence Production Policy 2018 had set a target of USD five billion in defence exports by 2025.
The government has announced in the General Budget 2018-19 that it will bring out an industry-friendly Defence Production Policy 2018 to promote domestic production by the public sector, private sector and MSMEs.
"Defence Sector has been identified as one of the prominent sectors under 'Make in India' initiative to realise USD 5 trillion economy by 2024. India is the 2nd largest importer of arms as of 2014-18 with a share of 9.5 per cent of the total world imports," Singh said.
The defence minister has also acknowledged that nearly USD 3 billion of the defence items are being manufactured by the Indian private sector.
"Allocation for defence in India's budget 2019-20 is around USD 60 bn. Nearly 65 per cent of parts, components, sub-systems of existing systems has been de-licensed, India can now manufacture them & approx US$ 3 bn worth of defence items are being manufactured by the domestic private sector," he said
"The draft Defence Production Policy 2018 had set a target of USD 5 billion in defence exports by 2025. While the target is ambitious, it's encouraging to know that India's defence exports grew nearly six times over the past two years," he added.