by Sandeep Unnithan

For more than a decade, India has topped the global charts as the world's largest arms importer. This year, too, was no different. On March 13, the Stockholm Institute of Peace Research International (SIPRI), which tracks global arms transfers, certified India as having bought 12 per cent of all the weapons exported in the world between 2007 and 2017. India spends roughly $5 billion (Rs 32,000 crore) each year on arms imports.

Barely 10 days after the SIPRI report, on March 23, the ministry of defence unveiled its new Draft Defence Production Policy to promote domestic production by the public sector, private sector and MSMEs. The MoD last unveiled such a policy in 2011, even if it wasn't as detailed. As the saga of continuing import dependence shows, the story hasn't changed much since then.

The new draft defence production policy aims to turn India into an indigenous producer of defence hardware in seven years, i.e., by 2025, and to achieve a turnover of approximately Rs 1.26 lakh crore or around $26 billion, additional investments of nearly Rs 70,000 crore and employment for 2-3 million people.

The SIPRI's annual reports are a cause for great embarrassment in South Block, which knows its implications. A sustained dependence on imported weapons could constrain the country's foreign and security policies and stunt the growth of its defence-industrial base. This is one reason why China, briefly the world's largest arms importer before India took over in 2007, rapidly moved out of this club. China is today among the world's top five defence exporters producing an array of combat jets, warships and tanks for export. This is the space India wants to be in. Achieving self-sufficiency in defence manufacturing was one of the pillars of the NDA government's Make in India policy unveiled in 2014. The slogan had no policy to back it, a gap that took nearly four years to fill.

What the MoD lacks, defence industry watchers say, is not a lack of policy-it is translating that policy into action on the ground. On the face of it, India has a massive military-industrial complex. It has a weapons designer, the Defence Research and Development Organisation, and a network of public sector production agencies-ordnance factories, shipyards and aircraft assembly factories. But this military-industrial complex is able to meet only around 40 per cent of the requirements of the defence services. The reasons are manifold. The armed forces have a huge shopping list of hardware to replace their aging arsenals, mostly of Soviet-origin.

Indigenous projects face big time and cost overruns, leading to imports. The IAF's bugbear has been a DRDO project to field a Light Combat Aircraft, started more than 30 years ago. The first complete squadron of 18 LCA Tejas jets is yet to be inducted and only nine jets have been produced so far. This is the reason why it wants another line of imported jets to make up for the shortfall caused by retiring MiG-21s.

A fast emerging defence private sector feels neglected by the government, which, it says, favours the DPSUs when it comes to placing orders for defence hardware. The orders, when they materialise, are not in numbers that would make for economies of scale. The new policy is meant to address all these issues even though, clearly, its implementation will be a challenge.