India needs the ownership of its design to successfully make its defence architecture 

Junaid Suhais

On the night of 8 May 2025, more than 500 Pakistani drones and missiles came into India across 15 military and civilian sites. What stopped them was not one system but a layered, mostly Indian-built shield: Defence Research and Development Organisation’s (DRDO’s) Akash intercepting swarming drones, Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL)-built Akashteer command network fusing sensor tracks in real time, the Indo-Israeli Medium Range Surface to Air Missile (MRSAM) holding the mid-range layer, and BrahMos, at roughly 70 percent Indian content, striking targets 314 kilometres inside Pakistani territory. Operation Sindoor did in four days what three decades of policy documents had not. 

It answered, under fire, the question every Indian defence planner has asked since 1999 Kargil conflict: Does Aatmanirbhar Bharat actually work?

The uncomfortable part of that answer is where it stops. In the same week Akashteer was proving itself over Punjab and Rajasthan, the engine India has wanted since the Kaveri programme began in 1989 was still sitting in a boardroom contest between two European manufacturers, a contest that would run another full year without a decision. The missiles flew. The engine didn’t. That gap, between what India has learnt to build outright and what it has only learnt to license, assemble, or co-produce under someone else’s design authority, is the real story of India’s defence technology transfer programme since June 2024, told across three tracks moving at three very different speeds.

Three Tiers, Not One Ladder

The government’s own language treats transfer of technology (ToT) as a single, ascending staircase: licence, then joint development, then full indigenisation. The record since June 2024 tells a different story. It shows three tiers operating simultaneously, in different domains, at different speeds, and India’s position on each has almost nothing to do with how long the programme has run. Because BrahMos began as genuine joint intellectual property in 1998, India inherited both the production line and the right to redesign it. Because the C-295 began as licensed assembly in 2021, India inherited the line but not the pen. Two decades of patience have not closed that gap on their own. What closes it is the structure of the original deal.

Missiles have moved furthest. Submarines and manned aircraft remain closest to where they started. And fighter engines, the most jealously guarded technology in the business, are the live test of whether ‘full transfer of technology’ announced at a podium survives contact with a signed contract.

What made Sindoor’s layered shield function as a single system, rather than four separate weapons firing in the same general direction, was the Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS) fusing tracks from Akashteer, Akash and MRSAM into one real-time air picture. Kill-chain decisions, detect, identify, allocate the nearest interceptor, engage, ran through IACCS automatically rather than through a human relay between radar operators and gun crews. That net-centric backbone is itself a domestically built system, and its performance under a genuine multi-directional saturation attack is arguably the single clearest proof that India’s indigenisation programme has produced something more than a collection of platforms. It has produced an architecture.

The distinction that matters is not licence versus ownership in the abstract. It is know-how versus know-why. Know-how is the ability to manufacture, assemble and maintain a system to specification. Know-why is the understanding of the underlying design logic well enough to redesign it, adapt it, or replace a failed subsystem with something better. India has now accumulated enormous know-how across nearly every platform in its inventory. What the past two years have clarified is exactly where know-why stops, and it stops in a different place for every programme, depending on how the original agreement was structured rather than on how many years India has spent building under it.

Licensed to Assemble

The Tata-Airbus C-295 programme is the clean case of the first tier. The Vadodara final assembly line, inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in October 2024, is producing more than 85 percent of the structural and final assembly of the 40 aircraft built on Indian soil, with 13,000 detail parts manufactured domestically and 37 India-based suppliers onboarded.