Strategic shift: India asks private companies to firm up defence production

With defence budget stagnating and government agencies lagging in building weapon systems, India needs the private sector to fill up the production vacuum

Since his appointment as defence minister in May, Rajnath Singh and his ministry’s officials have held a flurry of meetings with public- and private-sector defence companies. In these, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has urged private firms to ‘Make in India’, so as to meet the indigenous production targets set out in the Defence Production Policy of 2018 (DPrP 2018). This policy explicitly aims to make India one of the world’s top-five defence producers, with an annual turnover of $26 billion (Rs 1.85 trillion), by 2025.

The ambitious target gives India’s aerospace and defence industry just six years to more