For years dependent on Russian imports, India moves to ramp up domestic defense production

NEW DELHI: The Indian defense minister said on Thursday India was ramping up domestic production of complex military equipment, a shift that has acquired added urgency against the background of international sanctions on Russia and concerns about future imports to a country whose dependence on Moscow for its military hardware still runs as high as 55 percent.
With the world’s second-largest army, fourth-largest air force and seventh-largest navy, India has for decades been dependent on arms imports, especially from Russia, which in the 1990s contributed 80 percent of its defense equipment.
The one-source dependence dropped significantly with the entry of US and European producers into the Indian market in the 2000s, but Moscow still remains a key player.
“Our main goal is to promote self-reliance and export in defense,” Defense Minister Rajnath Singh said, as he released a list of military equipment that will be produced domestically.
The list contains 101 items including complex defense systems, tanks, sensors, rockets, multi-role helicopters, patrol vessels, anti-ship missiles, anti-radiation missiles and other supplies of war used by the Indian Armed Forces, which Singh added “were earlier only imported.”
The Ministry of Defense said in a statement weapons and platforms from the list would be procured from local sources within the next five years, estimating that the orders would be worth over $38 billion. 
India has been working for the past few years on decreasing its dependence on a single source of military imports. The Defense Ministry identified a “positive indigenization list” of more than 300 military items since May last year, and in its 2022-23 budget, the government said 68 percent of the India’s capital defense procurement would be directed at local manufacturers.
“The significant acquisition of Western platforms in the past five-seven years has diluted that percentage or brought down the share of Russian weapons in the Indian defense market,” Nandan Unnikrishnan, a distinguished fellow at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, told Arab News.
“And in addition, it is important to keep note of the fact that there are levels of production that have been indigenized.”