AIBRIEF
At a New Delhi defense industry conference, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh called for India to make its own drone parts, software, and batteries.
India can deliver the speech. It cannot reliably press the mold for one. Defense Minister Rajnath Singh's call at NDIC 2026 to make India a global drone hub is, on the minister's own accounting, bottlenecked below the assembly line, in the mold presses, flight software, engines, and battery cells the country still imports.
Singh cites the Ukraine war and the US-Israeli campaign against Iran as the new industrial syllabus, with sustained strikes on Russian energy infrastructure as the template. The Indian Defense Forces' Vision 2047 modernization plan now adds a dedicated drone force alongside space and cyber commands.
The neighbors already field comparable combat-drone fleets. China produces the GJ-11 Sharp Sword and Wing Loong II; Pakistan co-produces Turkey's Bayraktar TB2 and Baykar Akinci alongside Chinese Wing Loong II, per RT's coverage of the speech. The same reporting attributes a May 2025 rehearsal of saturation-drone tactics to a five-day India-Pakistan clash; that account is single-sourced and disputed.
The PLI scheme — India's Production Linked Incentive (PLI) program for the drone sector — notified in September 2021, released a provisional list of 23 beneficiaries in July 2022: ideaForge, Dhaksha, Garuda, Raphe Mphibr, and others in a Bengaluru-led cluster. Total incentive: ₹120 crore (~$14M USD) over three financial years, with a 40% minimum value-addition floor. That is the 2022 seed cohort, not the 2026 roster. Whether it has closed the parts gap is the falsifier Singh's own framing invites.