India, July 18 -- India's first privately built rocket lifted off from Sriharikota on Saturday, marking the first time a domestic company has independently reached orbit and joining a small group of private firms globally with such a capability.

Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1, a seven-storey, all-carbon-composite launch vehicle, took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 12:05 pm. Roughly an hour later, the Hyderabad-based company said on X that the rocket had "completed its final burn and injected its payloads into a ~450 km orbit".

The feat, it said, had made India "the third country in the world with private orbital launch capability".

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a post on X ahead of the flight, described the mission as "a h...