New Delhi, July 4 -- India's arms industry was worth looking at differently in 2014. In the fiscal year ending March that year, Indian defence companies sold Rs 686 crore worth of equipment abroad. The figure that Defence Minister Rajnath Singh cited at a New Delhi media organisation event on Saturday represents a 57-fold increase on that number: Rs 38,000 crore in defence exports for FY 2025-26, a threshold the country had not approached a decade ago and which analysts in 2014 rarely treated as a ten-year target.

the domestic supply side and the foreign demand side - at a pace that previous government policy had set as an aspiration without a clear mechanism for achieving it within a single decade.

"India's journey over the last 12 yea...