Defence has just got more firepower, thanks to Aatmanirbhar Bharat!

The contours of India’s latest efforts to boost indigenous defence production have Make in India written all over. Measures laid out by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman last Saturday include banning the import of weapon systems that can be made in the country, corporatising the beleaguered Ordnance Factory Boards (OFBs) and raising Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in defence manufacturing to 74 percent from 49 percent.

These weapons acquisition plans — part of the Rs 20 lakh crore stimulus package for re-starting an economy reeling under the COVID-19 stranglehold—are in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s idea of building an Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India).

By all accounts, the catalogue of prohibited arms imports is to get longer every year depending on fresh inputs from the armed forces. “We will notify a list of weapons and platforms for ban on their imports and fix deadlines to do it,” said Sitharaman. These platforms must be bought only from domestic companies and not from foreign firms and the spares for these weapons must also be manufactured indigenously. To facilitate this, the government intends to make a separate budget provisioning for domestic capital procurement.

“This will help reduce a huge defence import bill,” Sitharaman noted. It is not clear, though, how the government will revamp the scores of OFBs which are under fire for producing inferior armaments including artillery shells. The minister, however, ruled out privatising them and indicated overhauling their management instead so that they could be listed on the stock market. And since the steep increase in the FDI cap in arms manufacturing falls under the automatic route, it does away with the need for government sanction.

These reforms could not be happening sooner, considering India’s dubious tag of being one of the biggest arms importers in the world. In fact, the latest report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute lists the US, China and India — in that order — as the world’s three biggest military spenders in 2019. Russia and Saudi Arabia occupy the fourth and fifth spots, respectively.

The irony is that, despite this, India continues to lag many other countries in its actual military spending. Set against its gross domestic product (GDP), India’s defence expenditure remains at the bottom of the list of big military spenders. The country’s latest defence budget, in fact, hovers below the 1.6 percent mark of GDP — the lowest since the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962. It is hard to explain why a country, whose economy grew at around 7 per cent annually till recently, cannot afford to spend even 2 per cent of its GDP on national security. Tiny Singapore, with a population of about five million, has a defence budget that accounts for 5 percent of its GDP!

The new measures announced by the government will go a long way in reducing India’s overdependence on imported military hardware: an Achilles’ heel of the Indian military. For the effort to succeed, however, it is important for all three services to change entrenched mindsets. For instance, the chief reason for the military’s preference for imports has to do with services qualitative requirements (SQRs): specific conditions that must be met before new weapon systems are accepted.

Most of the time, unrealistic SQRs are quoted which cannot be met by state or local private companies and, as a result, the advantage passes to foreign vendors. It is high time the armed forces stopped flagging concerns about SQRs needlessly and approved equipment produced locally even if all the SQRs are not met, provided, of course, there is no compromise on military capability.

Now that policymakers have redefined defence ­procurement with a focus on indigenisation, building a military-industrial complex in the country no longer seems like a pipedream. Along with a long-term integrated perspective plan -- to keep the industry informed in advance about the military’s requirements -- this will help unfold a new road map for modernising India’s armed forces.

Prakash Chandra is former editor of the Indian Defence Review. He writes on aerospace and strategic affairs. Views are personal.