India Builds the Tejas Fighter, the INS Vikrant Carrier and the BrahMos Missile at Home, and Its Defence Exports Reached a Record ₹38,424 Crore in 2025-26

India now designs and builds its own fighter jet, aircraft carrier, ballistic-missile submarines and a supersonic cruise missile, and in FY2025-26 its defence exports reached a record ₹38,424 crore. The Tejas Mk1A, built by Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL) in Bangalore, was designed by Indian engineers, its airframe riveted from Indian parts, its radar and mission computer wired in India. There are roughly thirty of them, built, flown, tested.

For most of the last two decades India was the single biggest arms buyer on the planet, importing almost everything that flew, floated or fired. Today it builds its own aircraft carrier, its own cruise missile, its own ballistic-missile submarine, and, for the first time in its history, sells weapons abroad in real quantity. The transformation is genuine.

From two-thirds imported to a policy that says “no”

Rewind to the early 2010s. India was importing roughly 65 to 70 percent of its major defence equipment. (The figure gets inflated to 90 percent in the retellings; two-thirds is the number the standard estimates support.) Fighters came from Russia and France, submarines from Germany and Russia, artillery from wherever it could be bought. A country that had been independent for six decades was, in hardware terms, almost entirely dependent.

The pivot was deliberate and it was industrial policy, not slogan. “Make in India,” launched in 2014, put manufacturing at the centre; “Atmanirbhar Bharat” (roughly, “self-reliant India”) turned it into a defence programme from 2020. The sharpest instrument was the bluntest: the government published positive indigenisation lists, catalogues of equipment that simply could not be imported after a set date. Five such lists now cover more than 5,500 items. If you want that part, the rule says, buy it from an Indian factory or build one.

Money followed the rule. The Ministry of Defence now earmarks 75 percent of its capital acquisition budget for domestic sourcing. (A 65 percent figure gets quoted alongside it and means something else entirely: the share of equipment actually in service that is now made in India. The two get mixed up constantly.) Guaranteeing demand is the oldest trick in industrial development: give a manufacturer a buyer it can count on, and the factory gets built.

The output is measurable. India’s annual defence production hit a record ₹1.78 lakh crore (about $20 billion) in FY2025-26, up 15.6 percent on the revised ₹1.54 lakh crore of FY2024-25, and several times the level of a decade earlier. The question was never whether India could assemble things. It’s whether it can design the hard parts. That’s where two acronyms come in.

DRDO and HAL: the engine room of self-reliance

Two state institutions carry most of the weight. DRDO (the Defence Research and Development Organisation) is the sprawling network of labs that designs missiles, radars, torpedoes and the systems inside them. HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) is the aircraft builder, the company that turns a design into a flying machine on a production line.

Their flagship collaboration is the Tejas, the Light Combat Aircraft: India’s first home-designed fighter to reach squadron service. It is a real aeroplane doing real work, and the order book is serious: 83 Mk1A jets contracted in 2021 for around ₹46,000 crore, and a follow-on for 97 more signed in 2025 worth another ₹62,370 crore. That’s a planned fleet of 180 fighters, built in India.

The Tejas flies on an American engine, the GE F404, and when GE’s deliveries slipped by more than two years, the programme slipped with them. The engine is taken up near the end of this piece.

The missile that found a buyer

The BrahMos missile, a joint venture with Russia, has already found two foreign buyers.

BrahMos is a supersonic cruise missile. It flies at nearly three times the speed of sound, low and fast, powered by a ramjet. It is a joint venture, born in the late 1990s between DRDO and Russia’s NPO Mashinostroyeniya, with India holding the majority stake (50.5 percent). Two decades on, it is manufactured, upgraded and increasingly localised in India, and it is one of the most capable weapons of its kind in service anywhere.

In 2022 it did something no Indian weapon had done before at this scale: it won a foreign customer. The Philippines signed a $375 million contract for three coastal-defence batteries. The first was delivered in April 2024, flown in aboard a transport aircraft; a second batch went by sea in 2025. For a country that had spent its entire post-independence history as a buyer, the direction of the arrow had reversed. India had become a seller of a frontline missile system.

Then came a bigger one. On 30 May 2026 India confirmed a BrahMos contract with Vietnam, for the land-based coastal-defence version, worth about $629 million. That is the largest single defence export deal India has ever signed, and it makes Vietnam the second country to buy the missile. The Philippines proved the product could be sold abroad at all. Vietnam proved the first sale was not a one-off.

Together those two deals are the emblem of the export push, proof that “Made in India” defence hardware could meet a foreign military’s standards and its cheque.

A carrier, a missile family, a submarine

The heavy-industry end of the story is where the engineering is most visibly Indian.

INS Vikrant, commissioned in September 2022, is the first aircraft carrier ever designed and built in India. It’s a 45,000-tonne warship assembled at Cochin Shipyard, roughly ₹20,000 crore of steel and systems, with the Navy putting indigenous content at about 76 percent, over 550 suppliers and 100-plus small firms feeding one hull. Only a handful of nations can build a carrier at all. India joined the club by building one, not buying one.

Then the missiles. The Agni family is DRDO’s long-range ballistic line, and its most advanced member, Agni-V, reaches beyond 5,000 kilometres. In March 2024, in a test named Mission Divyastra, India flew Agni-V carrying MIRV technology for the first time: multiple independently targetable warheads on a single missile, a difficult piece of engineering that only a small number of countries have mastered.

And beneath the surface, the Arihant class, India’s nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines. These complete the “nuclear triad,” the ability to launch from land, air and sea. INS Arihant was the first; INS Arighaat, commissioned in 2024, is reported to be about 70 percent indigenous. A nuclear submarine is one of the most complex machines a country can attempt, and India is building them at home.

Add the artillery. The Pinaka rocket system and the ATAGS towed howitzer (both DRDO designs, both built substantially by private Indian companies) have moved from prototype to production, and Pinaka has begun finding export customers abroad. The private sector, long a bystander in Indian defence, now accounts for a large and growing share of what gets built.

The export ledger

India’s defence exports have climbed steeply since 2013-14. In 2013-14, India exported defence goods worth ₹686 crore, a rounding error, essentially nothing. In FY2024-25 the figure was ₹23,622 crore. And in FY2025-26 it hit a record ₹38,424 crore, roughly $4.5 billion, a jump of nearly 63 percent in a single year, per the Ministry of Defence’s own figures released in April 2026.

That’s a fifty-fold rise in a little over a decade. India now ships defence equipment to more than 80 countries, and the number of Indian firms exporting has climbed past 145. Private companies now supply nearly half of those exports. This is no longer just state factories moving surplus. The government’s stated target is ₹50,000 crore in exports by 2029, alongside ₹3 lakh crore of domestic production.

What India still imports

India still buys a large share of its weapons abroad, and is one of the two largest arms importers on Earth.

According to SIPRI, the Stockholm institute that tracks the global weapons trade, India was the world’s second-largest arms importer in its latest five-year count, taking about 8.2 percent of all imports, behind only wartime Ukraine and ahead of every other nation. Imports fell by about 4 percent against the previous five years.

Russia supplied 40 percent of India’s arms imports in SIPRI’s newest fact sheet, published in March 2026, down from 51 percent in the window before it. Earlier reporting, this article included, had put the Russian share nearer 36 percent. The direction of travel is downward, and France (about 29 percent) and Israel (about 15 percent) have moved in. The shift is slower than the headline version of the story, and India still buys a large chunk of its imports from Moscow.

The main dependency is the jet engine. The Tejas Mk1A flies on the American GE F404, with a contract for 99 engines and only a handful received as of early 2026, so about thirty finished airframes were waiting for them. India has worked on its own engine for decades through the Kaveri programme, which has not yet produced a powerplant good enough to fly a fighter, and the planned AMCA stealth fighter is also being designed around a foreign engine. The hot section of a jet engine, the metallurgy of turbine blades that spin white-hot without melting, is know-how that a handful of firms guard closely, and India’s would-be partners have been reluctant to share the deepest secrets.

There are others. Advanced semiconductors, certain sensors and seekers, high-end materials: the components that sit at the very top of the technology ladder are still, largely, imported.

The transformation, and what comes next

A generation ago India could build very little of its own arsenal and had to buy the rest. Today it designs and builds aircraft carriers, ballistic-missile submarines, MIRV-capable missiles and a supersonic cruise weapon that foreign militaries now line up to purchase. That is not a cosmetic change. It is deep industrial capability, built over decades, and the export ledger proves the world takes it seriously.

The next stage is the handful of hard components at the summit of the technology ladder: the jet engine first, then advanced semiconductors, sensors and seekers, and high-end materials. India has shown it can make airframes and hulls, and these are the parts that separate a country that assembles advanced weapons from one that can build every part of them alone.

India has climbed much of that mountain, and the engine is the next stretch.