Govt Aims To Create Defence Equipment Worth $5 Billion By 2025: DRDO Official

The Central government has an ambition to create defence equipment worth $5 billion by 2025, said a senior officer of the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) on Friday (3 September), reports Economic Times.

Hari Babu Srivastava, DRDO Director General (Technology Management), said that multiple schemes have been initiated to fund startups to fulfil this objective.

“The genesis of this programme is to generate wealth for the country. All wealthy countries have rich defence ecosystems and the Indian government has the ambition to create USD 5 billion of defence equipment by 2025,” Srivastava was quoted as saying during the launch of the Amity University’s MTech in Defence Technology course.

The DRDO official added that there is a need to enhance the efficiency and overall count of productive people right from the beginning to realise this ambition. He encouraged the students to begin their own research and development (R&D) startup upon completing this program.

Srivastava underlined that the aim should be to fight the next war with "our weapons".