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According to a March 2026 report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), India was the world’s second-largest importer of arms during 2021-25, accounting for 8.2% of total global materiel imports. Considering the ongoing, four-year-long war with Russia, Ukraine was unsurprisingly ranked as the world’s largest arms importer, with a share of 9.7%, while Saudi Arabia and Qatar occupied third and fourth place at 6.8% and 6.4% respectively.

India, for its part, has either been the largest or the second-largest defence equipment importer in most of SIPRI’s assessments between 2011-25. In recent years, however, it has occasionally been overtaken by Saudi Arabia and, more recently, Ukraine but despite that India’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) refuses to acknowledge these rankings. And, when questioned about them by parliament’s Standing Committee on Defence (SCoD) in December 2024, the MoD somewhat disingenuously told it that no reliable information existed confirming India as the largest arms importer.

At first glance, SIPRI’s ranking is at odds with the MoD’s own procurement data, as for several years it has increasingly prioritised indigenous materiel acquisitions. According to a March 2025 SCoD report, of the 337 capital acquisition contracts signed by the MoD between April 1, 2023 and December 31, 2024, only 12 were awarded to foreign vendors from Russia, the United States and France.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

The financial figures reinforce this perception. During the same period, the government spent Rs 2,00,396 crore on capital acquisitions, of which equipment worth Rs 1,55,751 crore, or around 77.7%, was procured from Indian companies. This shift is partly the result of the procurement procedure’s prioritisation of domestic suppliers. So much so, that for the past three years, the government has earmarked 75% of the annual defence capital acquisition budget exclusively for such purchases locally.

Given these numbers, India’s continued appearance at or near the top of SIPRI’s global arms import rankings raises an obvious question: Why does the Sweden-based Institute still categorise India as one of the world’s largest importers of weapons?

Part of the explanation lies in the methodology used by SIPRI to measure arms transfers. Instead of calculating the monetary value of defence imports, SIPRI relies on a metric known as the trend-indicator value. This valuation system estimates the volume of transfers of major conventional weapons using a standardised unit derived from the known production........

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