India’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has reached a critical milestone in its flagship Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) initiative, indicating a decisive move toward improving indigenous defence innovation and manufacturing capabilities.
The ministry has now given over 650 research and development contracts to Indian start-ups, MSMEs, and individual innovators. These contracts, at around ₹3,000 crore, aim to accelerate prototyping and technological maturation within the national defense ecosystem.
The iDEX platform, which was introduced in 2018, has emerged as a key catalyst for India’s Aatmanirbhar Bharat strategy in defence R&D. The most recent milestone demonstrates not just the MoD’s success in drawing young innovators and commercial firms to the defence domain, but also a systematic shift in how it facilitates dual-use and military technologies. The contracts awarded cover more than 50 technology categories, including unmanned aerial and ground systems, advanced ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) payloads, encryption-based secure communication networks, AI-powered battlefield analytics, and miniaturized propulsion and guidance systems.
The iDEX model provides innovators and MSMEs with early-stage funding, technical mentorship, and direct access to user agencies within the Indian Armed Forces and the DRDO. The ₹3,000 crore investment serves as both a developmental grant and a market-access vehicle, helping start-ups transition from idea demonstrations to production-ready prototypes. Many of these projects are currently undergoing integration trials with tri-service platforms, such as drone swarms, secure tactical radios, maritime surveillance systems, and counter-UAV technologies verified by the Army Design Bureau and Naval Innovation and Indigenisation Organisations (NIIO).
Beyond innovation competitions, iDEX has established a sustainable military industrial basis that supports Make in India through procurement categories such as Make-II and iDEX Prime. These structured channels encourage collaboration with public sector units and defence production agencies such as HAL, BEL, and BDL, while also exploiting private sector agility. The growing base of approximately 350 start-ups and 100 MSMEs allows for modular subsystem development, import substitution, and component-level innovation in avionics, sensors, secure networking, EW systems, and materials science.
The milestone is consistent with the Defense Acquisition Procedure (DAP 2020) and the MoD’s goal of allocating at least 25% of its R&D budget to industry-led innovation. The Defence India Start-up Challenge (DISC) and iDEX Prime verticals continue to seek mission-ready innovations for field deployment by 2026-27. Furthermore, cooperation with the Technology Development Fund (TDF) and newly formed Defence Industrial Corridors in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh ensures that iDEX-supported prototypes go to the scaled production stage.
This cumulative progress indicates how iDEX has become the focal point of the MoD’s self-reliance architecture, bridging the gap between idea incubation and product introduction. By providing finance, coaching, and a user interface to Indian inventors, the platform strengthens India’s defence supply autonomy while lowering dependency on imported components. The 650 chosen projects represent a maturing ecosystem that combines innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic defence capability development, creating the operational and technological groundwork for a strong Aatmanirbhar Bharat in the coming decade.
