Breaking the Bottleneck: India's Defence-Industrial Growth through Parallel Design Tracks

India's Defence-Industrial Progress: The Need for a Second Design Track

India's defence-industrial model has long been plagued by a persistent bottleneck: the Defence Research and Development Organisation's (DRDO) monopoly on design authority. This single point of failure limits the institute's engineering bandwidth, slowing down entire programmes and hindering the country's defence-industrial growth.

The issue lies not in stripping DRDO of its design authority, which remains essential for baseline research, classified technology development, and systems where national security considerations demand tight government control. Instead, the solution lies in creating a second design track, where private sector engineering houses are licensed to develop parallel variants, upgrades, and derivative products under a structured technology-transfer and design-rights framework.

This concept is not foreign to Indian industry. Tata Advanced Systems, Larsen & Toubro's defence engineering arm, Bharat Forge's Kalyani Strategic Systems, and Adani Defence have all built genuine systems-engineering depth over the past decade, moving beyond licensed-manufacturing roles. However, they lack authorised access – the formal design rights and technical-data packages that would enable them to independently develop derivative products without requiring DRDO sign-off.

Israel's defence industry offers a useful comparison. Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI), Rafael, and Elbit operate with more design autonomy relative to Israel's Ministry of Defence research establishment than Indian private firms currently have relative to DRDO. This autonomy enables Israeli defence firms to iterate export variants and rapid upgrades at a pace that outstrips comparable Indian programmes.

To build a second design track in India, three concrete institutional moves are required. Firstly, a formal technology-data-package licensing framework must be established, transferring genuine design rights to qualified private partners for defined derivative work. Secondly, liability and certification protocols must be put in place, allowing private-sector-designed variants to receive independent airworthiness or ordnance-safety certification without requiring DRDO validation. Thirdly, a revenue-sharing or royalty structure must be implemented, giving DRDO labs a continuing financial stake in derivative products built on their baseline designs.

This approach does not diminish DRDO's role as India's primary defence research institution. Instead, it multiplies DRDO's effective engineering output by allowing private sector partners to absorb derivative and variant-development work that currently competes for the same limited lab bandwidth as frontier research. A defence-industrial base with one design authority for every major platform will always move at the speed of that authority's weakest bottleneck. In contrast, a defence-industrial base with a genuine second design track, properly licensed and incentivised, can move at the speed of its fastest capable partner instead.

By breaking the bottleneck of DRDO's monopoly on design authority, India can unlock genuine systems-engineering depth and drive defence-industrial growth. A second design track will enable private sector engineering houses to develop parallel variants, upgrades, and derivative products, ultimately leading to a more robust and efficient defence-industrial base.