Quepem, Goa. 28 March, 2016. Defexpo 2016 officially took off in the rural environs of South Goa amidst crowd, aplomb and not much teething troubles, surprisingly. And the early bird actually got the worm– no jams, no entry queues and a fully functional media centre. And the inauguration ceremony in addition to the routine welcome addresses had a live demonstartion for the first time in the sweltering heat of Goa, which managed to keep eyeballs intact.
The Minister for Defence Manohar Parrikar, Minister of Defence for State Rao Inderjit Singh, Chief Minister of Goa Laxmikant Yashwant Parsekar , Secretary Defence Production and the other VVIPs on the dais, happy over Goa being the venue for Defexpo, and an announcement by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar that the DPP 2016 was uploaded on the website at nine today, made the inaugural session, as routine as always. He stressed that DPP will boost the agenda of the Make in India and ensured that the concerns of foreign companies on offsets will be looked into in the DPP 2016. Buy Indian – Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured (IDDM) will make India a exporter from being an importer in defence arena. He added that this will create more partnerships and will also create a level playing field for both Indian and foreign companies.
Recently Secretary for Defence Production AK Gupta while addressing the media at Delhi provided the first official assessment of the real foreign content of India’s total defence procurement, which he put at 60 per cent. “We so 60-65 per cent of our procurement from domestic companies. If you take out the foreign content that these companies put in and work out the indigenous content, it comes to about 40 per cent,” Gupta estimated informed. He also laid down a target of 60 per cent indigenisation in the next five years which seems quite unlikely. Today the Defence Minister added that 66% of items in the offset list have been delisted from defence lists for the ease of business of foreign OEMs.
