Solar Industries India manufactures the actual PINAKA missile fired from the MBRL

As the world’s second-largest importer of defence hardware, India accounts for nearly 10 per cent of all global annual defence sales. It pours tens of billions of dollars in enriching the defence industries of its major arms suppliers, Russia, the US and Israel. Imported hardware does improve India’s combat potential, like when the Indian Air Force’s fleet of giant US-built C-17s rapidly airlifted its Russian-built T-72 battle tanks to Ladakh during the ongoing face-off with the Chinese, but it comes at a cost.

A country which cannot make its own defence hardware becomes, in effect, a net importer of military power at the mercy of its importers for spares and after-sales support, and is often unable to convert its national security strategy into combat power. Two contested borders with hostile nuclear powers China and Pakistan mean the threat is unlikely to subside in the near term.

A swadeshi military-industrial complex has been a decades-old quest for India. Yet the road paved with good intentions is littered with the carcasses of promising projects to build conventional submarines and fighter jets. There are, however, islands of excellence like radars, sonars and missiles where the country has become entirely self-sufficient. “We don’t need to ever import a missile again,” says Dr G. Satheesh Reddy, chairman, DRDO.

What has been missing in recent years is a consistent political push or a roadmap with deliverables. The BJP was the first political party to include the goal of indigenisation in its 2014 manifesto, but the Narendra Modi government’s ‘Make in India’ initiative never took off for various reasons. Part of this is the dysfunctional monopsony within the sector, the government is the largest producer and the only buyer of defence hardware, and does neither very efficiently. This leads to the easiest option, imports.

The political vision for an indigenous military-industrial complex came for the first time with a technocrat defence minister, the late Manohar Parrikar. He, in particular, resurrected two critical projects, the LCA Tejas Mark 1A and HAL’s HTT-40 Basic Trainer Aircraft, and worked to reduce the hidden ‘import content’ embedded within indigenous weapon systems.

There have been several beacons of indigenous success stories. Projects for strategic missile-carrying nuclear submarines and several DRDO ballistic missiles were made under conditions of technology denial, with no choice but to make them locally.

Perhaps, this is the spirit behind the defence ministry’s August 9 list banning the import of 101 items of defence hardware over the next five years. It is the government’s first serious attempt to walk the talk on Atmanirbharta and for defence minister Rajnath Singh to take that vision forward. But we have a long way to go.

L&T Defence
Established: 1985
Self-Reliance On Fast Track

L&T Defence is India’s largest defence private sector player involved in several programmes for the navy, coast guard, army and air force, with a shipyard on the east coast and a manufacturing facility on the west coast. Currently, it is executing the largest contract awarded to an Indian private company by the Union ministry of defence through global competitive bidding. It won the contract worth Rs 4,500 crore to supply 100 units of ‘K9 Vajra’ 155 mm/ 52 calibre tracked self-propelled howitzer guns in 2017. The self-propelled howitzers are a three-decade-old requirement and are being delivered to the Indian Army at a dizzying pace. The first 51 guns were delivered ahead of schedule in January this year. The remaining 49 guns will be delivered by December, again ahead of schedule, despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

Advanced Technology Vessel Program
Established: 1983
Sub Powerhouse

India’s first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN), the INS Arihant, completed its first deterrence patrol in November 2018. A deterrence patrol, when a submarine sails with its full complement of nuclear weapons, represents the activation of the third leg of India’s nuclear triad of land, air and sea-launched nuclear weapons, two decades after India entered the nuclear club and 35 years after it formally began the project. The Arihant, commissioned in 2016, vaulted the country into an exclusive club of five other nuclear-weapon states, the US, UK, France, China and Russia, with this capability. All of Arihant’s key components, the nuclear reactor, nuclear-tipped missiles and submarine, are made indigenously. In the Advanced Technology Vessel’s project management and industrial production blueprint lies the formula for success which is only now being replicated in other projects, like the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft ‘Tejas’.

Building an SSBN is a complex process and involves combining multiple disciplines of submarine building, nuclear reactor technology and underwater-launched ballistic missiles. A nuclear reactor has to be compacted into the hull of a submarine the size of a two-storey building. The platform has to launch its ballistic missiles, tipped with nuclear bombs, while moving underwater. The missiles breach the ocean, transit the atmosphere, arc into space before re-entering the atmosphere to hit targets.

India’s ATV Project was set up in 1983. The joint Indian Navy-DRDO-BARC project was headed by a retired navy vice-admiral reporting to the Prime Minister’s Office. Arihant’s construction began only in 1998, when India announced its entry into the nuclear club with the Pokhran nuclear tests.

Arihant was built at the Ship Building Centre (SBC) in Visakhapatnam. This huge industrial ecosystem had to be built literally from scratch because India, as a non-NPT signatory, faced technology denial regimes.

Three more SSBNs are now being built. Future variants, a 6,000-tonne nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) and a bigger 12,000 tonne SSBN, can now be built in shorter time frames.

Solar Industries, Nagpur
Established: 1995
Explosive Growth

Satyanarayan Nandlal Nuwal, founder of Solar Industries India Ltd, has established indigenous capability in a niche area, high-melting explosives (HMX) used by the military.

In the 1970s, Nuwal tried his hand at various small businesses, but it was in 1978, when he took on an explosives storage magazine, that he found his calling. By 1984, he was a stockist for Imperial Chemical Industries, and by 1995 he had set up Solar Industries in Nagpur for manufacturing explosives. Nuwal’s firm scaled up slowly, from 50 tonnes of explosives a decade ago, to over 300 tonnes per annum now, becoming among the world’s top five commercial explosives manufacturers.

Solar Industries went public in 2006 and was listed on the BSE and NSE with a market capitalisation of Rs 10,000 crore.

Nuwal spotted another major growth area, manufacturing ammunition for the Indian armed forces. When this government-held monopoly was thrown open to the private sector, Solar Industries, in 2010, set up the world’s largest HMX manufacturing facility, a capability for which India had till then been totally import-dependent.

Bharat Forge
Established: 1966
Forging Ahead

Pune-based Indian multinational Bharat Forge (BF) is a technology-driven global leader in metal forming, supplying to several sectors including automotive, power, oil and gas and construction and mining, among others. Part of the Kalyani Group, a $3 billion conglomerate, it offers full service supply capability to its customers, from concept to product design, engineering, manufacturing, testing and validation. The world’s largest forging company, with manufacturing facilities across India, Germany, Sweden, France and North America, Bharat Forge manufactures a wide range of high-performance, critical and safety components.

Besides being India’s largest manufacturer and exporter of automotive components, it is a global leader in chassis component manufacturing. It evolved from being just a products supplier to a preferred development partner and strategic supplier of choice to most global original equipment manufacturers. Over time, it transformed into a global engineering and technology company, establishing many state-of-the art facilities for various operations, including precision manufacturing, advanced materials manufacturing, metal injection moulding, cold forging, power electronics and software.