Introduction
The defence industrial base that India inherited post-independence was built for someone else’s needs. It was fragmented, built for basic, supportive and aged equipment, and incapable of addressing the immediate needs of a large nation surrounded with hostile neighbours. On a general notion, it can be characterised as a remnant of wars that India had been dragged into against its will. The 18 ordnance factories scattered across the subcontinent, the aircraft repair sheds at Bangalore, the ship-repair yards at Bombay and Calcutta, had all been designed to keep imperial forces supplied. They were not meant to, or were capable of delivering, a sovereign state the means to design and build its own weapons. For the next four decades, Indian planners, scientists and soldiers worked through a slow and often frustrating process of turning a colonial repair-and-supply apparatus into something that could, at least in parts, think and build for itself. The period between 1947 and 1990 offers an uneven institutional experiment in which, genuine scientific ambition collided repeatedly with bureaucratic caution, industrial inexperience and the plain difficulty of building complex machines. The year 1990 was a defining era for India and the world. As India entered into the 21st century amid the post-cold war geopolitical shift, the objectives and approach of gaining self-reliance through indenisation promised by past leaders was renewed. This renewed push had to be compromised again because of the Kargil incident and various sanctions put on newly emerged nuclear India. These restraints caused the overall organisational culture to remain production-oriented, and away from innovation driven capability development consortium. Although the inconsistent attempts led by a crisis cornered planning could not deliver the intended results, it had built the institutions, trained manpower and hammered hard-won lessons that made the missile and space successes of the following decades possible. This article consolidates all these multidirectional trajectories which could not meet at their intended point of confluence but are still instrumental in establishing a foundation which can be fine-tuned to innovate and annihilate.
