Defence Ministry envisages policy to boost local content

In order to promote the level of indigenous content in defence equipment procured by the Indian Armed Forces, India’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) is rolling out a new policy. The guidelines can be attributed to ‘Public Procurement (Preference to Make In India) Order’, 2017 and aim to bring down the dependency on foreign imports. The policy has been designed for around 112 items, as per a list updated in May’19.

Among other things, the list includes products such as blast attenuation seats, avionics, torpedo handling trolleys, helicopter traversing systems and various alloy steel plates. Under the guidelines, the minimum local content required by a local industry is “ordinarily 50%”, though the specific threshold is to be decided by the MoD. In the wake of local capability advancement and the government’s ‘Make in India’ campaign, the list is likely to expand in the near future.