The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) was held in New Delhi on Monday with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and, as usual, the troops were let loose on the money, and the plentiful liquidity was channeled almost completely into Indian factories. The council approved capital acquisition proposals worth approximately Rs 1.10 lakh crore, a formal "acceptance of necessity" that marks the green light for a procurement process, which is usually two to four years long and would lead to the inking of contracts and delivery of hardware. Almost 98 per cent of this amount has been allotted to domestic industry, which was unimaginable a decade ago, when India was the world's largest importer of arms by a considerable margin.

The shopping list speaks for itself - how the armed forces are looking to fight the next war, not the last. The council approved for the Army, Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear reconnaissance vehicles, which can detect and map contaminated areas, as well as high mobility vehicles, self-propelled mechanical mine layers, Advanced Light Helicopters, trawl tanks and Sarvatra bridging system. These are not sexy, but necessary items of gear that are crucial to a mechanised column being able to negotiate difficult terrain, where a river crossing or even a minefield are exposed.

The Navy's allocation is focused on Arudhra radars, which will be replacing the outmoded Air Route Surveillance Radars that are used to protect naval air stations, along with funds for design and development of indigenous Marine Gas Turbines, the engines that power contemporary warships. The cost of the project is not a major one; but the fact that it is a domestic design programme in Indian shipbuilding is more significant than the figures indicate. The Air Force clearances concern electronic warfare such as Ground Based Multi-Purpose Jammers, as well as a new Defence Forces Secure Access Card system based on the RFID which will replace paper passes and Defence force identity documents across the military installations with a single access system.

Numbers can deceive when not interpreted in the context of the progression over the course of the year. This isn't just an isolated announcement. Council had already got approval for clearance of approximately Rs 1.05 lakh crore in July in the buy Indian-IDDM category, which includes armoured recovery vehicles, electronic warfare systems, an integrated inventory management platform for the tri-services and naval assets like mine countermeasure vessels and submersible autonomous vessels.

With the clearance of missile systems worth nearly Rs 79,000 crore and mobile electronic intelligence platforms and naval torpedo and gun upgradation, the total amount of Acceptance of Necessity for the financial year ticks closer to the Rs 3.3-3.6 lakh crore mark defence-minded brokerages have been predicting since February. This is nearly twice the government's annual capital defence spending of nearly Rs 2.19 lakh crore, which has increased by a whopping 21.9 per cent from the budget estimate of the same year and now represents about 28 per cent of total defence spending. The pipeline of approved, but not yet contracted work is beginning to grow at a rate that is faster than the rate at which the treasury spends in a single year which is exactly what they're supposed to do.

Behind these figures is the indigenisation push that has tangible outcomes. While the volume of domestic defence production has grown by nearly four times in the past decade to a record Rs 1.78 lakh crore for the last financial year, Defence Public Sector Undertakings continue to dominate the scene but private companies are gradually catching up, with their share in those listed companies rising from around 9 per cent in FY23 to about 16 per cent today and estimates in the brokerage circles put it at close to 17.5 per cent in two years time.

In relative terms, exports have advanced even more rapidly, to Rs 38,400 crore last fiscal year, which is 63 per cent higher than the year before and well above the even the government's own target of Rs 30,000 crore, as exports of Indian-made equipment are now flowing into over eighty countries. That export figure was contributed by private companies, and the inclusion of companies other than the traditional PSU heavyweight giants such as Hindustan Aeronautics, Bharat Electronics and others shows the ecosystem has grown beyond the four corners of the PSU giants to the shores of the many MSMEs that are now part of the supply chain with the ministry stating it now has around 16,000 of them.

None of this eradicates the tougher questions remaining unanswered by the experts in New Delhi and as well as outside. Necessity is not signed Contract and in India's procurement history, approvals that languished at the trial or negotiation stage for years. While foreign design collaboration continues even as part of the project is assembled at home as with marine gas turbines, which are also being procured through nomination-based orders a revision to the Defence Acquisition Procedure is likely to place greater emphasis on competitive bidding and a strategic partnership model just because it has been criticised for restricting the spirit of competition among private players.

What Monday's clearance does confirm, along with the long series of approvals that have come before it, is a policy path that is not going to change anytime soon bigger budgets, clearly a desire to spend more with home suppliers, and a defence industry that is increasingly expected to be a self-supporting exporter rather than a customer for foreign ones.