Defence Minister Shri Arun Jaitley released a booklet here today highlighting efforts made by Department of Defence Production in the last three years in pursuance of self-reliance in defence sector. It is a compilation of the achievements of the Department of Defence Production in the field of indigenous production of weapon systems/platforms and policy initiatives undertaken in the past three years.
Ever since the launch of Make in India initiative in September 2014, the focus has been to improve the business environment by easing processes to do business, encourage participation of Indian public and private sectors in defence production and promote innovation and indigenous development of equipment and weapon platforms.
The booklet mentions a number of policy initiatives which have been taken by the Department of Defence Production. These are relaxation in Foreign Direct Investment policy, providing exchange rate variation protection to domestic industry, level-playing field to private sector in terms of excise duty/custom duty at par with public sector, liberalising licensing policy and extending the validity of industrial licensing to 15 years, streamlining defence offset guidelines and restoring services as an avenue for discharge of offsets. It also includes facilitating exports by issuing NOC online, hosting procedure for issue of NOC and list of military stores in public domain besides doing away with end-user certificate, revising make procedure to promote design and development, promulgating green channel policy, categorising certain Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) products as non-core, aligning payment terms of Defence Public Sector Undertakings (DPSUs), etc. It also mentions about Make in India portal for defence production which is a very industry-friendly website covering all policy procedural issues.
The booklet also mentions that Ordnance Factories and DPSUs, working under the administrative control of Department of Defence Production, have not only enhanced their production from ? 44,000/- crore to ? 56,000/- crore but have also delivered many state-of-the-art platforms to the Armed Forces, including Light Combat Aircraft Tejas, Surface to Air Missile System Akash . During the last three years, 128 industrial licences have been issued.
Other highlights are, all naval ships and submarines on order are being constructed in Indian shipyards and percentage of capital procurement from Indian vendors has gone up from 47 to 61 in the last three years.
A number of steps are being taken to augment production capacity by DPSUs, such as infrastructure building for Mine Counter Measure Vessel at Goa Shipyard Ltd., new helicopter manufacturing facility at Tumakuru, second production line for Dhruv at Kanpur, manufacturing capacity for T-90 and PINAKA Rockets and manufacturing facilities for Medium Range Surface to Air Missile (MRSAM) at Ibrahimpatnam, Hyderabad.
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