By A Correspondent
New Delhi: For years, Bharat Forge Limited’s ambition to enter India’s defence space was met with indifference—and often, outright derision. At the 2012 DefenceExpo in Delhi, company chairman Baba Kalyani recalls Indian Army officers walking past the artillery gun his team had painstakingly developed. “Some laughed,” he said. “Not a single one stopped to see what it was.”
The problem wasn’t the product—it was disbelief. That an Indian private firm could build something as complex as an artillery system seemed implausible to a defence establishment still fixated on imports. “Everyone believed only global suppliers could do it,” added Bharat Forge’s Joint managing director Amit Kalyani.
Today, that same gun stands as a symbol of India’s defence self-reliance under the Make in India campaign. But the journey wasn’t born out of foresight—it was forged through frustration, missed chances, and the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.
“This idea came to me around 2011,” said the senior Kalyani, who saw synergy between Bharat Forge’s metallurgical capabilities and artillery systems. Drawing on his military school background and friendships in uniform, he realised that gun systems were essentially complex forging projects — Bharat Forge’s core strength.
Yet back then, defence manufacturing was a public sector preserve. Even after India received a full technology transfer from Sweden‘s Bofors in the 1980s, the private sector was kept out. Kalyani pitched the idea to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2011, and was redirected to then Defence Minister A. K. Antony. “He listened for 15 minutes and said thank you. I got no response,” the senior Kalyani recalled in a podcast aired recently.
A file tracing Bharat Forge’s efforts in the sector dated back to 1976, but by 2012, India was still importing the same equipment. “We were offering guns at half the price of imports. Price wasn’t the problem. It was the mindset,” said Amit Kalyani.
Everything changed with the launch of Make in India in 2014. At a defence conclave that year, Kalyani contributed directly to policy formation. The real shift, however, came under the then Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, whose 2016 reforms opened the doors to private innovation. “He understood the system — and how to fix it,” said Kalyani. “If he were alive today, we’d be even further along.”
Kalyani says India fell behind China and South Korea because it kept the private sector out for too long. “Innovation was throttled by red tape,” he noted. “In the public sector, you spend Rs 100, and someone from finance asks why. You spend more time defending expenses than designing solutions.”
Today, defence is a core vertical for Bharat Forge, and the economics are clear. “We make guns at half the cost of imports — with Indian materials, Indian technology, and Indian brains,” Kalyani said. A decade ago, no one believed. Now, they do.
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