DefExpo to be held in Guj next March

NEW DELHI: India’s flagship military exhibition, DefExpo, will be held at Gandhinagar in Gujarat next March with focus on projecting the country as an emerging defence manufacturing hub -- one of the top priorities for the government in the defence sector, officials familiar the developments said.

The biennial show will be held in Gandhinagar from March 11 to 13, the department of defence production announced on Friday. It comes at a time when the government has sharpened its focus on promoting self-reliance in the defence manufacturing sector and positioning India as an exporter of military hardware.

In May, the government notified a list of 108 defence items that cannot be imported by the armed forces with the ban kicking off from December 2021. The list, called ‘positive indigenisation list’, will be implemented progressively from December 2021 to December 2025.

This was the second such list to be notified by the government in less than a year. In August 2020, the government prepared a list 101 items on which there would be an embargo on import to give a push to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan’ (Self-Reliant India Movement).

The embargo for items in the first list, then called ‘negative import list’, kicked in for different items last year and will run through till 2025.

DefExpo was traditionally held in Delhi until 2014 after which it has seen a string of new venues --- Goa (2016), Chennai (2018) and Lucknow (2020). The venue was shifted to Goa when Manohar Parrikar was the defence minister, it moved to Chennai when Nirmala Sitharaman held the portfolio and it was staged in Lucknow with Rajnath Singh as the defence minister.

Defence manufacturing firms from across the world participated in the five-day mega event held in Lucknow last year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated DefExpo-2020, attended by ministers from almost 40 foreign countries.

From raising foreign direct investment (FDI) in defence manufacturing to creating a separate budget for buying locally made military hardware and notifying two lists of weapons/equipment that cannot be imported, the government has taken a raft of measures to boost self-reliance in the defence sector over the last two years.

IT COMES AT A TIME WHEN THE GOVERNMENT HAS SHARPENED ITS FOCUS ON PROMOTING SELFRELIANCE IN THE DEFENCE MANUFACTURING SECTOR