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While the main purpose of Emmanuel Macron’s visit to India was the AI Impact Summit, his meeting with Narendra Modi was naturally an opportunity to refer to India’s purchase of 114 Rafale fighter jets for more than €30 billion. For us this huge contract can also be an opportunity to gauge India’s dependence on foreign suppliers to modernise its army and its efforts to break free from this dependence and gain true strategic autonomy.  

A faltering defence industry 

The frustration of the Indian defence industry is not a recent phenomenon. In 2018, Richard Bitzinger, an expert in the field, wrote that “its performance over the past half century has been disappointing to say the least”. Responsibility for this setback is generally attributed to public companies in the sector, starting with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), which are criticised for delivery delays and poor quality equipment, even by active military personnel themselves. Two products in particular fuel the Army’s anger: the Tejas aircraft and the Arjun tank. Launched in 1984, the HAL Tejas fighter jet has experienced repeated delivery delays, with the result that the Indian Air Force can only fly around 38 of them. Delivery of the next 40, ordered in 2017, has been postponed several times by the Indian manufacturer, HAL. Some experts believe that these delays will render the aircraft obsolete before deliveries are complete, given the rapid pace of technical progress in this field. Similarly, the Arjun tank, which was also launched in the 1980s, has still not been delivered.

Other failures less high-profile than these “white elephants,” which have cost the Indian government billions, are often cited. The INSAS assault rifle is said to have caused many casualties among the Nepalese army when it was fighting the Maoist guerrillas due to major malfunctions. More surprisingly, India’s ballistic missile programme is said to have been “a bit of a bust”. Similarly, in 2025, HAL had to give up on equipping the air force’s jets with the radar that the DRDO had developed and turn to foreign suppliers.    

Less damaging but still problematic, the number of accidents involving Indian defence industry products is causing mistrust among soldiers throughout the chain of command. The Army lost 16 of the 154 Dhruv helicopters it had acquired in accidents, and the one that killed two pilots patrolling the Indian coast in 2025 deprived the country of reliable air cover, with the other aircraft grounded for systematic........

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