L&T's US Drone Deal: How India Will Build High-Tech UAVs Faster

The L&T company produces various military equipment, including warships, artillery guns and armoured tanks, among others.

Addressing ANI's National Security Summit in the national capital, Ramchandani noted that India's defence manufacturing base still needs a broader industrial ecosystem and called for a balanced approach that combines local development with strategic partnerships.

"To build a strong defence industrial base requires a large ecosystem and it's evident that India has a long way to go in developing that ecosystem. I would say we should adopt a two-pronged strategy. One is to keep encouraging people to get into deep tech, to build products, build the ecosystem base...We can't take a very hard stand that we are going to do everything ourselves. We have to permit where it is going to take us some time to build that ecosystem, to permit partnerships, to permit people to co-develop products together, to co-produce products together. This kind of dual-pronged strategy will work well..." he said.

About its recent partnership with General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI), Ramchandani said L&T realised that building an unmanned aircraft from scratch, similar to the US company's Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) drone, would take too long.

"Traditionally, you know, we relied a lot on building our own products through our R&D. We see an acceleration in the procurement, which is happening. And when we looked at, uh, you know, General Atomics is already supplying Hale aircrafts to India. And, when we saw that there is going to be a large-scale procurement of MALE aircrafts, we realized that in the time frame, if we went back to the drawing board and tried to create an aircraft ab initio, it might be a tall order," Ramchandani said.

He said this made L&T look at joint development and they were quite open to looking at partnerships to address this opportunity. And, collaboration with General Atomics, which already has the predator drone in service with the Indian forces proved to be a option.

Ramchandani added L&T had two requirements while discussing the tie-up- to be competitive on price because Indian procurement, at the end of the day, still values the lowest bidder.

Second requirement, he said was an "openness to integrate Indian systems onto the aircraft, to adapt the aircraft for the Indian requirements, swap modules with indigenised or other modules."

The US firme, he said "had an openness to that, which then gave us an opportunity to really look at how do we drive? How do we design for cost? How do we design for purpose?.., we're not just bringing a product and saying we license produce it here. We will bring a product and make it suitable for the Indian requirements. And that has many dimensions from cost to performance to security.."

Ramchandani acknowledged that US export controls remain a factor. "The US, you know, all that said, the US does have tight regulations on technology export and we'll have to navigate through that. But I see an openness on both sides to do it."

About the partnership the L&T official said, "We thought this is the right thing to do at this point in time, and I hope we will succeed."

In October this year Larsen & Toubro (L&T) and US-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) announced a strategic partnership to build these drones in the country.

Under this partnership, L&T will participate in the upcoming 87 MALE RPAS programme of the Ministry of Defence, where L&T will be the prime bidder and GA-ASI the technology partner.

The collaboration will enable the production of GA-ASI's MQ-series RPAS that are combat-proven. These are widely operational across the globe with millions of flight hours in surveillance and strike missions.

At a time when Operation Sindoor against Pakistan is still ongoing, India is looking to fast-track the project for acquiring 87 medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) drones to further enhance its surveillance capabilities over both sea and land borders.

A tri-service proposal of around Rs 20,000 crore, with the Indian Air Force (IAF) in the lead, is expected to be discussed by the Defence Ministry at a high-level meeting soon.

India recorded its highest-ever defence production of ₹1.54 lakh crore in FY 2024-25 and plans to expanding defence production to ₹3 lakh crore to achieve export targets of ₹50,000 crore by 2029.

- ANI