Key Points

The Defence Secretary highlighted that Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) would build a stronger ecosystem for defence technologies.

Speaking during a press conference in Pune, Singh said, "A lot of the electronics that go into defence will have dual use, of course...It is difficult to list out all of them but a lot of IoT (Internet of Things), a lot of machine learning applications, a lot of AI systems, a lot of cyber security products, all of them would have dual-use applications."

He emphasized that the government's focus was to ensure timely development and delivery of such technologies.

"The intent should be that we should be able to create enough synergy between our public-private sector and DRDO to develop a fairly large ecosystem of products where all of these different subsistence work together on, work together on a workshare basis if required to deliver products and technologies on time," Singh said.

The Defence Secretary also highlighted that Operation Sindoor, which destroyed terror bases in Pakistan, was also a "reality check" for the armed forces, allowing them to better understand where India's defence capabilities are.

The Defence Secretary said that "certain capability gaps were noticed" during the operation, including in areas of electronic warfare, counter-unmanned systems, and the need for having a better ecosystem for manufacturing military grade drones.

"it's pretty clear in the context of the geopolitical situation now that most countries are paying a lot of attention to defence and hard power again. Given our neighborhood, India is no exception, and we've just had this experience with Operation Sindoor, which was in some ways a reality check for us in terms of where we can do better, where we need to adapt to changing needs for future warfare," Defence Secretary said.

Speaking on the sidelines of the of the Southern Command Defence Tech Seminar (STRIDE 2025), he detailed the areas where the defence systems could be made better.

"So in the context of Operation Sindoor, I think that certain capability gaps were noticed, and those include areas like electronic warfare, counter-unmanned systems, better manufacturing ecosystem for military-grade drones, which can survive better in GPS-denied and other contested environments. Various types of low-level radars as well. So yeah, we had some areas where we thought that we needed to beef up our capabilities," he added.

He further mentioned that the intent has always been to use the whole defence industry to boost capabilities.

When asked about the solution to increasing capabilities, Secretary Singh said that the armed forces were given flexibility through emergency procurement rules to acquire something which was needed immediately. But for the long term, the rule has been to ramp up development of indigenous equipment by working with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

- ANI