DAC Clears Rs 52,000 Crore in Capital Buys With Anti-Drone, Air Defence Tilt

India’s Defence Acquisition Council on 3 July cleared capital procurement proposals worth about Rs 52,000 crore, granting in-principle approval to weapons programmes across the Army, Navy and Air Force in a package weighted toward counter-drone systems and layered air defence.

The council, chaired by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, accorded Acceptance of Necessity to the proposals at its Friday meeting. Acceptance of Necessity is the first formal gate in India’s capital acquisition cycle. It is an administrative clearance, not a contract. Tenders to industry follow, and final costs are settled later in the cycle.

The Army took the largest slice of the list. Cleared items include the Akash Tarang anti-unmanned aerial vehicle electronic warfare system, the Medium Range Surface-to-Air Missile weapon system and a Very Short Range Air Defence System. The service also won approval for man-portable anti-tank guided missiles, an active protection system for tanks and a jet-powered kamikaze drone system.

The Navy received clearance for a Multi Influence Ground Mine, a shipborne unmanned aerial system and a land-based facility for testing electric propulsion systems. The Air Force secured a fixed-wing High Altitude Pseudo Satellite, an unmanned platform designed to loiter in the upper atmosphere for intelligence, surveillance, telecommunication and remote sensing missions.

Taken together, the approvals stack detection, jamming and interception in depth. Counter-drone electronic warfare sits at the base. Very-short-range and medium-range surface-to-air missiles layer above it. Active protection extends the same logic down to individual tanks, while the kamikaze drone approval puts a stand-off strike weapon in the same tranche as the systems meant to defeat one. Coverage of the meeting characterised the package as leaning heavily on counter-drone and layered air-defence capability, an emphasis shaped by the lessons of Operation Sindoor.

The cleared tranche is roughly half of what was reportedly on the table. Reports ahead of the meeting said the council was expected to weigh proposals worth over Rs 1 lakh crore, including additional K-9 Vajra 155 mm self-propelled guns, next-generation heavyweight torpedoes and air-to-air refuelling aircraft. Pre-meeting reporting also listed air-to-ground precision-guided munitions for the Rafale and LCA Tejas fleets, along with the Verba very-short-range air-defence missile, among proposals under consideration. None of those items figured in the announced clearances.

Markets moved quickly to price the pipeline. Brokerages flagged Bharat Electronics, Hindustan Aeronautics, Bharat Dynamics, BEML and Apollo Micro Systems as likely beneficiaries once tenders are floated. The named Army systems play directly to the missile, electronics and unmanned-systems order books of those firms, though no vendor is selected at the Acceptance of Necessity stage.

The approved figure of Rs 52,000 crore is indicative rather than committed spending. Each proposal must now move through tendering, trials and price negotiation before a contract is signed, a process that in Indian defence procurement routinely stretches across years. What the 3 July meeting fixes is the shape of demand: drones, the means to detect and kill drones, and the missile layers stacked above them.