Indias Defence Exports To Hit 50000 Crore The Roadmap

TITLE: India’s Defence Exports To Hit ₹50,000 Crore? Defence Secretary Shares Roadmap CHANNEL: ET Now DATE: 2026-06-17 URL: https://youtu.be/p3WdW80YHwM

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I’ve missed Mr. Rajesh Kumar Singh for a very special conversation. We have the defense secretary, government of India joining us this morning to give us a sense as to how how mega themes are playing out. Mr. Singh, great having you. One of the big mega themes, Mr. Singh, that’s played out all through FY26 and hi, this is Harsh here, is the fact that defense exports that India is seeing have seen a huge jump over the last 5 to 6 years. There’s been a large renewed focus on exports. The goal is to hit the 50,000 crore mark by FY30. You believe now time to recalibrate that number possibly and and set a slightly higher target given the strong performance FY26 has been. We’re at 38 and a half thousand crore already.

Yeah, thanks for having me. You’re right. Defense exports have witnessed unprecedented growth over the last decade by increasing from less than 2,000 crores in 2014-15 to 38,400 odd crores in 25-26. And this demonstrates the growing global acceptance of Indian defense products and technologies. As you said, 50,000 crores target in 2013 now looks fairly modest and we do expect to sort of overachieve it significantly. But as of now, that is the target we have. But my expectation is that we’ll go much higher.

Hi, morning. Sajid here. You know, what we’ve seen in the last 10 to 12 years is the opening up of the defense sector to the private companies. And in a big way, you have companies now contributing to the demand which is coming from the defense you know, segment, whether it’s all the three services. Do you see the scalability of this architecture now to take a um a speed here given the fact that the kind of orders which are we now getting for for not just the public sector but private sector?

Yes, absolutely. I mean the it’s fairly we’ve made the policy direction fairly clear that we are going to create a level playing field for the private sector in terms of improving ease of doing business on the supply side and also ensuring that they are able to bid for any future products on an equal footing with the public sector. Their share in our overall domestic production right now is about 24%. I think that it’s been made clear by the Raksha Mantri also. We hope that this is actually going to increase to about 50/50 in the future. And we can see that happening. The trends are positive in terms of increasing number of orders. In many cases the orders they are getting is based on the technology partnerships that they have with the DRDO where they’ve they’ve become the development come production partners for DRDO labs. And thereafter they’ve secured fairly significant orders and contracts from our services. That trend will increase and as I said in the future our current overall domestic production level is about 178,000 crores. A 15% increase over the last year. We hope that the 24% share in this of the private sector gradually increases to a more equal footing.

Mr. Singh, you know, we have also seen opening up of many sectors or segments within the defense and you also mentioned that, you know, getting more private sector companies into the entire space. Uh which are the other sectors which will be opened up for private sector? We saw aviation or aircraft manufacturing you know opening up with AMCA where you are getting consortiums to come and you know participate in it. Are missile and tactical missile system also a space where private sector will be brought in?

Yes, absolutely. I mean other than the strategic programs where also the private sector does play a role as a as contractors and tier one and tier two vendors. But other than that we expect the private sector to be there in every domain which where the services need products and systems and platforms. We’ve made it clear that procurement will not be based on nominations. It will be done on a competitive basis. You mentioned AMCA where we have three private sector players. And two of them with in partnership with public sector companies bidding. And as you mentioned when it comes to missiles certainly tactical missiles as well for the naval short range missile and for the visual ads we already have private sector companies as a development come production partners and I hope to expand this to other types of conventional tactical missiles as well in the coming days.

Do you place public sector companies in this entire space? For the longest time they were getting nomination orders. Now do you think that they’re competitive enough to bid for these orders along with private sector?

Well, I mean certainly because of the the mover advantage they do have significant uh uh predominant market share. As I mentioned, now their share is about 76% of the overall domestic production in the country. So, obviously they’re not going anywhere. They are becoming competitive. The corporatization of our ordnance factory boards has also led to enhanced delegation of powers to them, has led to faster decision-making, more proactive uh you know, vendor engagement. And as a result, they’ve also improved their export performance, as well as their overall productivity and performance. But, as I said, in the long run, I hope that uh this country has a diversified uh dual pipeline of both the public sector and the private sector contributing equally to our defense production and to our exports.

What Mr. Singh, the difficulty here is uh striking a balance between uh made in India, which is which is self-reliance, and the operational and keeping up with the operational requirements of the armed forces. How do you envisage uh that to play out?

It’s a very good question, and uh it is a it is a big dilemma, because obviously there will be uh you may want long-term self-reliance in almost every domain, but you can’t achieve it uh probably even in the long run. What you can achieve is higher levels of design and technological sovereignty over most of your platforms. I would say that uh we have to uh take a pragmatic view. Where our TRL level is high, in areas like missiles, in areas like armored systems of different types, land systems, shipbuilding, there we should uh entirely go for uh you know, domestic production. There would be a certain areas like particularly in the aerospace area for particularly where you still need to rely on technology transfer combined with make in India, which is kind of option number two. And the last option in in some cases would be cases where demand requirements are not not large enough to induce foreign OEMs to set up shop in India. There you may have to go to buy for buy global, but that will be an exception. It will be absolutely exceptional in I would say 99% of the cases you’ll either see domestic production with a technology transfer or Indian design and Indian manufacturing rather than so in in both of these latter categories as I mentioned, it will be make in India and hopefully over time we increasingly turn to design in India and not just make in India.

So you know several challenges that we face including the likes of acquisition timelines and adhering to those. Even processes probably need to be fast tracked. Some of that has come through reform and and some of those reforms have have delivered strong very strong impact on ground. Talk to us about maybe the top two or three which have actually delivered very strong impact and where are the gaps today and what can be done on the policy side to kind of plug those gaps. Give us a sense.

Okay, so the two major things we done is something that I briefly mentioned earlier which is that the move from nomination to entirely competitive tendering among you know giving the private sector almost an equal opportunity not necessarily that they will get the every order but they will have the ability to compete for orders. The second is that we have increasingly enabled the DRDO enabled technology partners, the DCB partners to uh get orders and contracts from us. That is the other major trend that you are seeing. Recently, when it came to the artillery orders and some small arms orders, we had this happy combination of DRDO technology and design, but private sector manufacturing. Now, this This is the kind of sweet spot that we need to hit. Where we have uh Indian design and uh largely uh with uh driven by DRDO because they spend most of the R&D spend in the country when it comes to defense. But backed up increasingly by private sector manufacturing efficiency, as well as, of course, the continuing public sector role. So, that trend we have tried to sort of uh accentuate by reforms in our procurement processes, doing things faster. We did almost 4 and 1/2 lakh crores of uh contract signings in the last 2 years, almost 2 lakh crore plus in the last two financial years, which is double the signings that you saw in the highest point ever achieved in the in our historical past. So, that uh combination is uh good, but that relies on existing uh procedures. Reforming the procedures themselves in terms of making them making the process of RFP preparation, trials, and cost negotiations much more uh time-bound. That is the uh the reform form that uh the new DAP 26 envisages. That is hopefully in the final stages of preparation. And in that DAP 26, you’ll see some of these procedural changes that I mentioned.

Uh you know, in the last 2 years, we’ve seen uh a large amount of uh orders you know, getting through the DAC process, Defense Acquisition Council process, but uh many of them are taking time to get uh uh you know tender to or later intent letter of intent been given to by the public or private sector players. The reform process also looking at shortening the gap between the DAC approval and the tendering.

Well the figures that I mentioned were for contract signings. I didn’t even mention the the DAC approvals which are more like an inter principal approval to go ahead with a tendering process. So I when I said that we have doubled or more than doubled our contract signings over the last 2 years I meant actual hard contracts. The The the process reform that I mentioned in DAP 26 which is in now in the final stages of uh uh discussion in government will essentially again focus on compressing the timelines from the air an approval by the DAC to the contract signings by the department. That process has already been accelerated within the existing procedures but we intend to make the process itself much shorter. And in particular we want to bring in a new procedure for low cost uh acquisitions particularly in areas like drones where uh the technological obsolescence is very high where you need to do a quick trial and induction of certain types of platforms and weapon systems. That process that procedural reform will be part of the DAP 26.

So which we have seen one through operations in Duran the other one from the West Asia crisis is the low cost high impact warfare which which is now in play. Uh how much of the future ordering would focus on the changing warfare strategy or the transition that is happening towards electronic and drone warfare.

Quite a good chunk, I would imagine. Right after the of Sindhur was concluded, we uh we enabled the defense services to do an emergency procurement up to 15% of their capital budget. All of that almost all of that amount has been has been uh uh used to tie up contracts relating to drones and counter-drone systems and uh different types of electronic warfare equipment, uh mobile radars, etc. So, the lessons from the uh conflicts around the world and and of course of Sindhur itself have been learned and obviously we will be tailoring our capability development plans and our procurement plans accordingly.

Mr. Singh, uh you know, the Indian defense uh uh infrastructure uh or the complex Indian defense infrastructure complex uh has all its building blocks. Uh it was already already said by the private public sector and now private sector is coming in. Do you think uh it will take at least uh three or four years to uh have a concrete and high perfor- high delivery uh defense complex coming in into place? Uh or it will take some more time for that maturity to come in?

I think the maturity is literally happening before our eyes in terms of the new uh companies that are coming in including the large number of startups. The fact that many of them are able to secure funding. The fact that a large number of venture capital funds are investing in this space. So, that maturation, that critical mass of the defense industrial base is already happening. Also, the the ability of tier one and tier two vendors to move up the value chain and become a tier one vendor and ultimately an OEM, I can see even some evidence of that. So, yes, that maturation is happening and it is literally happening before our eyes and it will only accelerate in the days to come as we create, as I mentioned, this very level playing field for the private sector.

Final question to you, how do you see the space tech and space defense, uh you know, uh segment here? Are we geared to manage that the wars or war phase of the future will be there as well? How is India prepared for it?

Well, space-based surveillance is going to be critical and India is preparing for it through a fairly large program of adding to our satellite constellations in space. You must have heard of SBAS 3, that is ongoing. The launches will happen in the coming years. In the meantime, we have to ensure that if there are any gaps in terms of persistent surveillance, we tie up contracts to make sure that those gaps and those those those satellite imageries are made available to our defense planners. That is part of the ongoing exercise of filling the gaps when it comes to space-based surveillance in our country and the government is working hard to sort of rectify and fill those gaps.

Thank you very much for joining us today and in a giving us a perspective of where we stand and the kind of growth that the defense sector is going to see. Thank you very much today. We’ll step in into a small break and we’ll come back with more with the interview of Mr. Raghuram Raj.

[music] Woo!