Singh argued that without self-reliance in key areas, including defence, India will not be able to take independent positions on global issues consistent with its national interests. File image
A huge country like India cannot remain dependent on imports of military hardware as such dependence could be “fatal” to its strategic autonomy, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh said on Monday, underlining the Modi government’s priority for boosting of domestic production.
Speaking at a conference, Singh, without elaborating, also said that India faced “problems” in the past during “difficult times” due to its dependence on imports of defense equipment.
He said the annual volume of domestic defense production has crossed a record Rs 1 lakh crore, which was nearly Rs 44,000 crore around 2014.
“We will only be able to maintain strategic autonomy if weapons and equipment are made in our own country, by our own people. We have been working towards this and we have also seen positive results,” Singh said.
“While our domestic defense production was around Rs 44,000 crore around 2014, today our domestic defense production has crossed the record figure of Rs 1 lakh crore and is continuously growing,” he said at the ‘DefConnect 2024’ conference.
The Defense Minister said India cannot afford to remain dependent on imports in any key sector.
“A huge country like India cannot remain dependent on imports in any major sector. If we continue to depend on the import of defense equipment and weapons, this will make us dependent on other countries. This dependence could be fatal to our strategic autonomy,” he said. said.
Singh argued that without self-reliance in key areas, including defence, India will not be able to take independent positions on global issues consistent with its national interests.
“When our government came to power in 2014, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we saw a large part of India’s defense hardware being imported. If a significant portion of a country’s security-related equipment is imported, that country may face many difficulties in critical situations,” he said.
“This has also happened to India in the past. When India was in tough times, we faced problems due to our dependence on arms imports. Therefore, as soon as we came to government, we emphasized that as a nation we cannot remain dependent on arms imports,” Singh said.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
First print: March 4, 2024 | 12:32 pm IST