Chandrakar Bharti, Joint Secretary, Department of Defence Production | Photo Credit: Bijoy Ghosh

In the next couple of years, indigenously-manufactured Advance Light Helicopter (ALH) could take to the air with the State-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) set to outsource production of the chopper.

A Request for Proposal to select an Indian private company for complete transfer of technology will be made soon, said Chandrakar Bharti , Joint Secretary, Department of Defence Production.

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He said this in the context of how Defence Public Sector units and Ordnance Factories are becoming integrators with Defence production requirements increasingly being outsourced to the private sector.

Increased value

There is a concerted effort to indigenise hundreds of imported components/sub-assemblies. The value of outsourcing as a percentage of value of production has increased to 39 per cent last year from 36 per cent four years ago, he said at a seminar on Tamil Nadu as a preferred ecosystem for Aerospace and Defence Industries at the two-day Tamil Nadu Global Investors Meet 2019. The annual Defence production in the private sector is expected to touch ₹10,000 crore this year, up from ₹5,500 crore last year, and ₹ 2000 crore four years ago, he said.

Similarly, Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas’s critical components have been outsourced. A couple of days ago, the L&T factory in Coimbatore had supplied LCA wings to HAL, he said.

Around 275 items that were licensed under Ordnance Factory reserve list have been denotified so that the Armed Forces can go directly to the market with competitive bidding in which Ordnance Factories can also participate, he said.

The domestic aviation sector is growing at 20 per cent for the last four years and is the fastest aerospace market in the world, and projected to be the largest by 2020.