Revised 18 September 2026 · v2.2.0 · what changed

A list of things you may not buy abroad

Most industrial policy works by offering something: a subsidy, a tax break, a cheap loan. India’s defence indigenisation policy works mainly by forbidding something. The Positive Indigenisation List is a register of items that defence public sector undertakings may no longer import after a stated date. The name is a euphemism — it is a negative import list, and the Ministry of Defence occasionally calls it that.

The instrument is unusually clean. There is no money in it. The state does not pay anyone to indigenise a fuel pump; it simply announces that after a certain date the fuel pump cannot be bought from abroad, and leaves the DPSU and its suppliers to solve the problem. If the deadline is credible, demand certainty does the work a subsidy would otherwise do.

Six lists have now been notified. The Department of Defence Production issued four covering DPSU items — Line Replacement Units, sub-systems, spares and components — and on 18 August 2026 notified a sixth of 405 strategically important items, 389 for DPSUs and 16 for the Indian Coast Guard.

Correction, 18 September 2026: the four DPSU lists sum exactly to the 4,666 the ministry states. This piece originally excluded a fifth list because its item count was not established in the sources used here, reporting 5,071 as a floor rather than the full count. That fifth list is now confirmed at 346 items by a Ministry of Defence release dated 16 July 2024 (PIB PRID 2033571) — independently corroborated by a second, later release (PIB PRID 2300723, 18 August 2026) stating "5,012 items notified under the first five Positive Indigenisation Lists" (4,666 + 346 = 5,012, exactly). The six-list DPSU total is therefore 5,417, not 5,071. Separately, the Department of Military Affairs runs its own indigenisation lists for services procurement — also now quantified, at 509 items across five DMA lists (PRID 2033571) — which remain a different series and are not counted in the 5,417 above; the two programmes combined cover 5,926 items.

The sixth list is not spare screws. It covers the advanced light helicopter, the light utility helicopter, Su-30MKI, the light combat aircraft and the AL-31FP engine; T-72, T-90 and BMP-II armoured platforms; warships; Konkurs-M, Invar and MRSAM missile systems; radars, sonars, fire-control and satellite communication systems; and high-explosive anti-tank ammunition. Its stated business potential is ₹3,070 crore.

Then look at what was actually replaced — and the ministry's own two numbers for it

Notifying an item is not indigenising it. The ministry publishes that second number too, and it is much smaller — but for the identical four-list, 4,666-item scope, its own releases fourteen months apart do not agree.

Correction, 18 September 2026: this piece originally published only the 2023 row as though it were current. Both rows are for the same declared scope — the four DPSU lists totalling 4,666 items — from Ministry of Defence releases fourteen months apart, and a cumulative count growing from 2,736 to 2,972 items (value ₹2,570 crore to ₹3,400 crore) over that period is directionally plausible. What is not established is a smooth rate: neither release states a precise as-of date beyond its own release date, so ₹94 lakh and ₹114 lakh per item are two snapshots, not a two-point trend. Both are shown because even the more recent one is, by the time of this correction, over two years old, and no newer PIL-1–4-specific figure has been located. “Import substitution value” is the ministry’s own term throughout and its method is not published; read it as the ministry’s estimate of the import bill avoided, not an audited saving.

The average is doing a lot of work here, and the 2023 release's two tranches show why. The 164-item tranche averages ₹4.96 crore an item; the 2,572-item tranche averages ₹68 lakh. The lists are dominated numerically by low-value components and dominated in value by a small number of significant ones. Any statement of the form “N items indigenised” is therefore close to meaningless as a measure of industrial achievement, because N is set by how finely the bill of materials was cut, not by how much capability moved onshore.

Two more figures, both now quantified for the first time in this piece. The 5th PIL carries its own reported pair — 346 items, ₹1,048 crore of import-substitution value (PRID 2033571) — not reconciled here against the PIL 1–4 method or added into the totals above, because neither release states whether it is counted on the same basis. The Department of Military Affairs' 509-item, five-list series carries no published value figure in the releases used for this piece.

Zoom out from the PIL sequence and the numbers get both bigger and blurrier. PIB PRID 2300723 (18 August 2026) states that DPSUs and Service Headquarters have together offered over 33,000 items for indigenisation on the SRIJAN portal — of which the 5,012 items across the first five PILs are one subset — and that more than 15,700 have been indigenised for an import-substitution value of about ₹9,000 crore over the preceding five years, alongside roughly ₹10,000 crore of DPSU procurement orders placed with domestic vendors up to March 2026. ₹9,000 crore across 15,700 items works out to about ₹57 lakh an item — the same shape of finding as the PIL-only numbers above, a long list against comparatively little money, but on a different, larger and non-comparable denominator.

One SRIJAN figure should not be read as a decline: the “items offered” total was over 36,000 as of June 2024 (PRID 2033571) and is over 33,000 as of June 2026 (PRID 2300723), in the ministry's own release series. A cumulative offer count cannot shrink; neither release explains the drop, which most plausibly reflects a re-basing or de-duplication of the portal's own count. Treat it as a data-quality caveat about the SRIJAN series, not as defence indigenisation going backwards.

The denominator nobody puts next to it

Set the substitution figure against what India actually produces in defence, and the proportion becomes visible.

Production, exports, private-sector share and the modernisation earmark are per the Ministry of Defence via PIB (production release dated 17 June 2026). Shares in the last column are computed here against the FY2025-26 production figure and mix periods deliberately — a cumulative achievement against one year’s output — which flatters the substitution number rather than understating it. The substitution-achieved row gives a range because the ministry's own two releases disagree on the underlying rupee figure (see the corrected table above); 1.4% uses the 2023 release's ₹2,570 crore, 1.9% the 2024 release's ₹3,400 crore.

That last point matters and cuts against the argument being made here, so it should be said plainly. The ₹2,570–3,400 crore range is cumulative across several years; the ₹1.78 lakh crore is a single year. Comparing them is unfair to the lists. It is done anyway because even on the generous reading — several years of substitution against one year of production, and using the larger of the ministry's own two figures — the ratio is 1.9 per cent. On a like-for-like annual basis, or using the smaller 2023 figure, it would be smaller still.

The production number itself is genuinely impressive and deserves saying without hedging: ₹1.78 lakh crore in FY2025-26, up 15.6 per cent on ₹1.54 lakh crore, and 110 per cent above the ₹84,643 crore of FY2020-21. Indigenous production is roughly four times its FY2013-14 level of ₹43,746 crore. Exports rose 62.66 per cent in one year to ₹38,424 crore. Something real is happening in Indian defence manufacturing.

Project ADITI: the invention half

A negative import list works only where the item can actually be made domestically once demand is guaranteed. For anything genuinely hard, forbidding the import just creates a hole. That is what Project ADITI is for.

Launched by the Raksha Mantri at DefConnect on 4 March 2024, ADITI — Acing Development of Innovative Technologies with iDEX — sits under the iDEX framework of the Department of Defence Production. It offers grant-in-aid of up to ₹25 crore per start-up, released against milestones, from a corpus of ₹750 crore covering 2023-24 to 2025-26. The stated aim is about 30 deep-tech critical and strategic technologies: artificial intelligence, quantum, cyber, satellite communication, semiconductors, autonomous systems, underwater surveillance. It also created a “Technology Watch Tool” intended to close the gap between what the armed forces need and what the ecosystem is building. The fourth edition carries 25 problem statements across the Army, Navy, Air Force and the defence space domain.

Note the shape of it. ₹750 crore over three years, at up to ₹25 crore a project, funds on the order of thirty serious attempts. Against ₹1.78 lakh crore of annual production that is 0.4 per cent — and against the ₹6.81 lakh crore Ministry of Defence budget for FY2025-26, closer to 0.1 per cent. ADITI is a seed programme, and its numbers are consistent with being one. The difficulty is that it is frequently discussed as though it were the answer to the hard end of the indigenisation lists, which is a much larger job than ₹750 crore buys.

Three instruments that do not talk to each other

India is running three separate defence-industrial instruments, each with its own headline number, and they are routinely reported as one achievement.

The attribution question is the one that is never answered. Defence production grew 110 per cent between FY2020-21 and FY2025-26. The lists were running throughout. So was ADITI, for the last two years. So were capital-budget increases, an export push, private-sector entry rising from 22 to 24 per cent of production, and a war-driven global demand environment. Nothing published lets a reader apportion the growth between them, and even the larger of the ministry's own two figures — ₹3,400 crore booked directly against the lists — is too small to be the main cause of a ₹93,000 crore increase in annual output.

This is not an argument that the lists are useless. Demand certainty is a real instrument and it costs the exchequer nothing, which is exactly why it is attractive. It is an argument that a count of banned items is not a measure of industrial capability, and that the ministry publishes the number that makes the point — the substitution value — while the coverage repeats the number that does not.

What is actually checkable

Unusually for Indian industrial policy, the underlying lists are public. The Department of Defence Production publishes DPSU-wise indigenised-item lists as PDFs on the Srijan portal — the May 2023 notification, for instance, is a 1.9 MB file that downloads without login or payment. Anyone wanting to check the composition of the 2,736 can read the actual item names.

Three things would settle the questions this piece leaves open, and all three are in the ministry’s gift:

• A per-list substitution value. At present the item counts are per-list and the value is a lump sum. Publishing value by list would show immediately whether the later, harder lists are delivering more than the first.
• The method behind “import substitution value”. Is it the last landed import price times the quantity now made domestically? Something else? Without the method the figure cannot be audited, only repeated.
• ADITI conversion. Of the roughly 30 technologies targeted, how many have reached a production order rather than a completed prototype. A grant scheme is judged on conversion, and the conversion rate is not published.

The honest summary

India’s defence manufacturing is growing quickly and its export performance is the clearest evidence of that, because exports are the one number a foreign buyer has to validate with money. The indigenisation lists are a cheap, sensible instrument for the long tail of components. Project ADITI is a reasonable seed programme sized like a seed programme.

What does not hold is the arithmetic that gets built on top of them in public discussion: that 5,417 barred items and ₹750 crore of innovation grants explain a ₹1.78 lakh crore production base. The lists have delivered somewhere between ₹2,570 crore and ₹3,400 crore of substitution by the ministry’s own count — two figures, not one, because the ministry has not reconciled its own releases. Either way it is roughly one and a half to two per cent of a single year’s output. The gap between the item count and the rupee value is not a scandal. It is just what happens when a policy is measured in the unit that is easiest to count rather than the unit that matters — and, this piece now has to add, when the unit that matters is itself reported inconsistently.

Sources and caveats