The Department of Defence Production has notified the sixth Positive Indigenisation List, adding 405 items with an estimated business potential of ₹3,070 crore to a programme that, since the Srijan portal went live in August 2020, has offered more than 33,000 defence items to Indian industry and indigenised over 15,700 of them. The numbers look good. Sixteen items belong to the Indian Coast Guard, 389 to Defence Public Sector Undertakings, and the list spans the Advanced Light Helicopter, the Su-30MKI, the T-72 and T-90 tank fleets, the BMP-II, Konkurs-M and Invar anti-tank missiles, MRSAM, and a range of radars, sonars and fire control systems. On the surface, this is exactly the kind of incremental, methodical self-reliance drive that Aatmanirbhar Bharat in defence was meant to produce.
A closer reading, however, reveals a pattern that has recurred across all six lists since the first Negative Import List in 2020. The overwhelming majority of items are Line Replaceable Units, sub-assemblies, spares, and raw materials tied to platforms that India already builds under licence or operates in large numbers. This is useful work. It saves foreign exchange, keeps assembly lines running during sanctions or supply disruptions, and gives MSMEs a bankable order book. But it is fundamentally substitution manufacturing, not technology acquisition. An Indian firm that wins a contract to produce a gearbox casing for the ALH or a hydraulic actuator for the Su-30MKI has absorbed a manufacturing process. It has not absorbed the design intelligence that determines why that gearbox is shaped the way it is, what its failure modes are, or how it should evolve for the next generation of the platform. This is indigenisation; the need is for an indigenous solution. The difference matters between ‘know-how ‘ and ‘know why’. That intelligence resides with the original technology holder, and no amount of list notification automatically transfers it.
The distinction matters because platforms have a finite shelf life, while the systems and critical technologies embedded within them do not. The AL-31FP engine on this list is a case in point. India has licence-produced this engine for two decades, yet the hot-section metallurgy, single-crystal turbine blade casting, and full-authority digital engine control software that define its performance envelope remain firmly with the original design house. The same holds for missile seekers on Invar and Konkurs-M, the transmit-receive modules inside modern radars, and the sensor fusion and fire control algorithms that integrate individual subsystems into a functioning weapon. These are the technologies that determine whether India can upgrade a platform independently 20 years from now or must return, cap in hand, to the country that sold it the original design. A list dominated by replacements and spares does little to close that gap.
This is not an argument against the Positive Indigenisation List as a mechanism. It is an argument for restructuring its emphasis. The Department of Defence Production and the Department of Military Affairs should consider carving out a distinct, smaller and more carefully curated tier within future lists, reserved specifically for critical and enabling technologies rather than components. Seeker heads, active electronically scanned array modules, engine hot-section technology, underwater sensor arrays, secure waveform and cryptographic sub-systems, and autonomy and targeting algorithms belong in this tier. Items here would have a different commercial architecture from that of ordinary indigenisation of components. They would need guaranteed multi-year development funding rather than a single production order, a formal engineering data package transfer from the DPSU or DRDO laboratory that currently holds the design, and shared intellectual property arrangements that allow the private developer to retain commercial rights to derivative applications.
Other nations that moved from assembly to design authority faced the same problem and built institutions to solve it. South Korea's Agency for Defence Development did not merely publish requirement lists. It ran structured technology transfer programmes into firms like Hanwha and LIG Nex1, with government engineers embedded alongside private teams for years at a stretch, until design competence genuinely changed hands. Israel's Directorate of Defence Research and Development performs a similar function, treating critical sub-system development as a joint government-industry undertaking rather than a procurement transaction. India's Innovation for Defence Excellence scheme and the Technology Development Fund are steps in this direction, but both remain oriented toward proof-of-concept funding rather than the multi-year, capital-intensive hand-holding that critical technology absorption actually requires.
Several specific steps would help close this gap.
First, every future Positive Indigenisation List should be published alongside a technology roadmap from the concerned DPSU or Service, outlining three- to five-year evolution paths for the underlying sub-systems, rather than a static component list, so private investment can be planned against a moving target rather than a single order.
Second, DRDO and the DPSUs should be mandated to transfer complete engineering data packages, not merely item specifications, to any vendor selected for critical technology development within a fixed, enforceable timeline.
Third, the government should fund a small number of regional, shared-access test and certification hubs, modelled on the Defence Testing Infrastructure Scheme but scaled up and focused specifically on critical sub-systems, so that MSMEs are not priced out of qualification.
Fourth, iDEX and the Technology Development Fund need a dedicated critical-technology track with funding horizons of five to seven years and milestone-based disbursement, rather than being run as a generic innovation challenge.
Fifth, price and volume assurance under the Defence Acquisition Procedure should extend beyond the first production order to cover at least one mid-life upgrade cycle, thereby providing private developers of critical sub-systems with a realistic return horizon.
The sixth Positive Indigenisation List deserves credit for continuing a genuinely useful policy instrument. But the true measure of Aatmanirbhar Bharat in defence will not be the number of items notified or even the value of imports substituted. It will be whether India, a decade from now, owns the design authority over the seekers, engines, sensors, chips, magnets, and algorithms that make its platforms work, rather than merely the licence to assemble them. That shift requires a decisive policy focus on systems and the critical technologies within them, backed by hand-holding that lasts as long as it takes the science to mature.
(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)
