12th Defence Expo 2022 Gandhinagar, Gujarat: Aims this exhibition is “to showcase the might of the domestic defence industry which is now powering the ‘Make in India, Make for the World’ resolve of the Government and the nation at large”.
Good wishes for the Defence Exhibition Organisation (DEO) would be in order as its five-day flagship event, DefExpo-2022, gets underway at Gandhinagar in the election-bound state of Gujarat.
The aim of this exhibition of land, naval and homeland security systems is “to showcase the might of the domestic defence industry which is now powering the ‘Make in India, Make for the World’ resolve of the Government and the nation at large”. Considering that India is currently the largest importer of arms, this is a bit of an overstatement.
The problem with such snappy taglines is that one can claim success even before the event unfolds, as the outcomes are not precisely measurable, and statistics about the acreage covered by the exhibition, or the number of participating exhibitors, countries, delegates, and visitors, can always be put together for the post-event fanfaronade, with glossy pictures thrown in for good measure.
In a publicity blitzkrieg before the event, MoD’s official tweet claimed on September 27 that the ‘Asia’s largest DefExpo (was) already the biggest since its inception with 1136 registrations’ and that the ‘unmistakable opportunity (spread) across a First-ever 4-venue format’ would enable ‘flourishing A&D Trade & Business’.
Three days before this tweet the exhibition had already been pronounced a grand success by the Press Release which claimed that this ‘first-ever edition exclusively meant for the Indian companies’ promised to be ‘the biggest ever’ with over 1000 exhibitors registering for the event, and many more expected to follow suit.
The Ministry of Defence made a virtue out of necessity by limiting the participation to the Indian companies, subsidiaries and divisions of the foreign companies registered in India, and joint ventures. This was a smart move as it would have been impossible to persuade the parent American and European companies to be present at the event alongside the Russian companies in the backdrop of the enduring mindless violence in Ukraine.
The limited participation will have some impact on the variety of equipment displayed at the exhibition, but the MoD has lined up several events to make up for this inadequacy. In a clear indication of India’s priorities, the 2nd India-Africa Defence Dialogue, in which 53 African countries may participate, and the Indian Ocean Region plus (IOR+) conclave with participation of about 40 countries, are scheduled to be held during the DefExpo 2020.
The DEO has also planned back-to-back ‘intensive interactions and ideation at seminars’ with eminent panellists from the central and state government, industry, academia, think-tanks, and the like, to ‘provide important learnings/take-aways/action points for further growth of this sector’.
Additionally, there will be a Defence Minister’s Excellence Awards presentation ceremony, live demos at Sabarmati River front, ship visits for the public by the Indian Coast Guard at Porbandar, and the Defence Minister’s dinner enlivened by a drone show open for public viewing. The drone show will be staged by an indigenous IIT Delhi start-up Botlabs, which is one of the many winners of several rounds of innovation challenges thrown open to the public by the MoD under the Innovation for Defence Excellence (iDEX) scheme.
The exhibition surely has the ingredients of a grand spectacle, and while there is little doubt that it will be quite well organised, the claims about its takeaways seem overpitched.
It’s difficult to visualise what kind of ‘flourishing A&D Trade & Business’ can take place at the exhibition. There will be no immediate buyers and sellers of the products on display. The companies participating in the exhibition are already operating in India and thanks to the intense involvement of the industry associations in facilitating interaction among the defence units and with the government at various levels, there is no pressing need to provide an additional platform for business networking.
At any rate, a packed back-to-back programme spread over five days isn’t likely to provide opportunities for many one-to-one interactions among the limited number of exhibitors and officials who will grace the exhibition. More importantly, the participants can be expected to be familiar with one other’s business interests and industrial capabilities.
For sure, some big announcements like the setting up of a manufacturing plant in Gujarat or investment in the state may be made by a handful of companies but it will be naïve to believe that the underlying deals were struck during the exhibition or facilitated by it.
The defence industry is always hungry for the opportunities to interact with the top brass of the central and state governments, especially MoD’s civil and military bureaucracy, but experience shows that seminars and discussions organised as a part of such mega events generally boil down to traditional ceremonies like lighting of lamps or tedious official monologues by the ‘dignitaries’ with hardly any time left for the participants to put across their perspectives.
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Meanwhile, the ‘public’ attending the exhibition may be curious to see the military equipment on display but cannot contribute to the discourse on ‘Make in India, Make for the World’ which has become the trope for self-reliance in indigenous research, development and production of military equipment, and exports. All in all, it promises to be a great public event, beyond which its contribution to furthering the cause of ‘Make in India, Make for the World’ remains unclear.
The DEO has its task cut out for itself as it will need to convince the world -in absentia, as it were, as the participation is limited to the Indian companies- that India is a budding defence manufacturing hub and has the potential of becoming a major exporter of arms, notwithstanding the fact that presently very few locally designed state-of-the-art weapon systems and platforms are being manufactured in India and, as observed earlier, India is currently the topmost importer of arms.
Most importantly, defence being a monopoly, business prospects are heavily dependent on the government’s ability to fund design, research, and prototype development, and buy the products manufactured by the industry. The well-acknowledged perennial shortage of funds is a damper which no one wants to talk about. Official statistics show that in the coming three years (2023-26), the defence outlay is likely to be Rs 9,87,470 crore less than what the armed forces may ask for. More than half of this would be for procurement of major equipment, weapon systems and platforms.
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Defence manufacturing cannot be sustained primarily on the strength of exports which, in any case, is a difficult market to make inroads into. India’s share in global exports presently stands at 0.2 per cent; increasing it to the level where it becomes the mainstay of the Indian defence companies is going to be very, very difficult indeed.
https://www.financialexpress.com/defence/defexpo2022-to-showcase-the-might-of-the-domestic-defence-industry/2716635/
