India's defence R&D: DRDO's missile and indigenous-systems programmes

What the topic is

India’s defence research and development is carried, more than in most democracies, by a single government organisation. The Defence Research and Development Organisation is the R&D wing of the Ministry of Defence, and its stated mission is self-reliance in critical defence technologies and equipping the armed forces with indigenous weapons (DRDO). This brief tracks the live thread of that effort: the missile and indigenous-systems programmes that DRDO develops, tests and hands to industry, and the parallel argument over how the organisation itself should be structured to deliver them. The two are connected — the tests are the output, the structure is the machine that produces them — but they move at very different speeds, and this brief keeps them separate.

The lineage runs back to the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme, begun in 1982-83, which set out to build five indigenous missile classes — Prithvi, Agni, Akash, Trishul and Nag — and was declared complete in 2008 (Wikipedia). The missiles making news in 2025-26 are the descendants and extensions of that programme, now developed as individual projects rather than under one umbrella.

The demonstrated capability: recent missile milestones

The clearest signal of what DRDO can build is its recent test record, most of it announced through official channels.

On 16 November 2024 DRDO conducted the flight-trial of India’s first long-range hypersonic missile off the coast of Odisha, a system it described as designed to carry payloads to ranges greater than 1,500 km, developed by the laboratories of the Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Missile Complex in Hyderabad with industry partners (PIB). The Ministry’s own statement characterised the test as putting India “in the group of select nations” with such capability (PIB).

On 11 July 2025 DRDO and the Indian Air Force flight-tested the Astra beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile fitted with an indigenously designed and developed radio-frequency seeker, launched from a Su-30 Mk-I; the Ministry said two launches destroyed high-speed aerial targets and that all subsystems, including the seeker, performed to expectation (PIB). The Ministry framed the indigenous seeker as a milestone in critical defence technology, the seeker having been among the import-dependent elements of an otherwise largely domestic missile.

On 24 September 2025 the Agni-Prime intermediate-range ballistic missile was test-fired from a rail-based mobile launcher together with the Strategic Forces Command — described by the Ministry of Defence as a first-of-its-kind launch that added rail mobility to the canisterised, solid-fuel system (PIB). The Ministry described Agni-Prime as designed to cover ranges up to about 2,000 km, and framed the rail launch’s significance in terms of mobility, short reaction time and reduced visibility rather than added range (PIB).

Alongside the strategic systems sits a widening base of tactical and air-defence work — the Akash and Akash Prime surface-to-air missiles, quick-reaction and anti-tank systems, the Pinaka rocket system, radars and electronic-warfare kit — plus DRDO’s role in the Indo-Russian BrahMos cruise-missile venture and, through the Aeronautical Development Agency, the Tejas light combat aircraft.

Operation Sindoor: indigenous air defence in use

The May 2025 India–Pakistan military exchange, which India called Operation Sindoor, is the episode most cited as a live test of Indian air-defence systems rather than a range trial. During the exchange, air defence including the DRDO-developed Akash surface-to-air missile and the Akashteer air-defence control-and-reporting network — which Bharat Electronics manufactures in collaboration with DRDO and ISRO (DD News) — was used against drones and aerial threats, and DRDO published a news compendium citing the operation as validation of indigenous systems (DRDO). DRDO and Army figures publicly described the performance of Akash and Akashteer in favourable terms; that characterisation comes from Indian officials and the organisations involved, and an independently verified performance record of any single system in that exchange is not established in the public record. IndiaStand records the deployment and the official assessment, and attributes the assessment to its source rather than presenting it as an independent finding. The casualty and loss claims around the same operation are separately contested and tracked in IndiaStand’s dispatch on that dispute.

The contested part: restructuring DRDO

The genuinely open question in the public debate is not whether DRDO can build missiles but whether its structure lets it deliver them at the pace the government wants. This is the subject of an active government reform effort.

The reform blueprint is the 2023 report “Redefining Defence Research and Development,” prepared by a nine-member committee chaired by former Principal Scientific Adviser K. VijayRaghavan (ThePrint). Its central recommendations, as reported, are to consolidate DRDO’s roughly forty laboratories into about ten national facilities; to have DRDO concentrate on research and hand prototype development and production to public- and private-sector industry; to stand up a new Department of Defence Science, Technology and Innovation to run collaboration with academia, start-ups and industry; and to route strategic direction through a Defence Technology Council chaired by the Prime Minister (Drishti IAS). Reporting on the committee’s findings attributes a large share of project delays to internal technology gaps, with smaller shares from shifting service requirements and bureaucratic process, and describes a regional imbalance in which a disproportionate share of the budget has historically gone to laboratories in a few cities; those proportions are as reported and vary by account.

As of mid-2026 the reform is in motion rather than settled. Reporting describes the push as directed from the Prime Minister’s Office, with implementation stalling after the 2023 report before being revived (ThePrint); defence-news accounts additionally reported a target of advancing the restructuring before DRDO’s 1 January 2026 Foundation Day, which IndiaStand records as reported rather than confirmed. The positions in the public debate run from officials framing the overhaul as making DRDO “leaner and more agile” to reporting of resistance inside the organisation and scientists’ concern about splitting research from development. IndiaStand records the reform as an active, contested process, attributes the competing characterisations to their sources, and does not forecast whether or when the restructuring completes.

The public purse

DRDO’s budgetary allocation was raised to ₹29,100.25 crore for FY2026-27, up from ₹26,816.82 crore in FY2025-26, with ₹17,250.25 crore of the newer figure earmarked for capital expenditure, according to the Press Information Bureau’s budget statement (PIB). That sits inside a Ministry of Defence allocation the government described as an all-time high of about ₹7.85 lakh crore for FY2026-27 (PIB). A recurring theme in analysis is that India spends a smaller share of its defence budget on R&D than several comparator states, and that the restructuring debate is partly about getting more output from that spend; that is a characterisation of the argument, not an IndiaStand judgement, and the comparative figures vary by source and definition.

Where the debate actually sits

The contested ground is narrow and worth stating precisely. On capability, there is little dispute that DRDO has an established and expanding missile portfolio; the arguments are about pace of induction, degree of true indigenous content in specific subsystems, and how far individual test successes translate into fielded, series-produced systems. On structure, the range runs from the government’s stated case that DRDO should shed production work and concentrate on research, to internal and analytical caution that separating research from development could break programmes that depend on tight integration — each position attributed to its holder. On strategic framing, DRDO’s output is read both as a self-reliance and industrial-base asset and as a strategic-autonomy and security asset in the wider contest with China; the same programmes serve both readings. IndiaStand characterises these positions rather than adjudicating them.

Who owns this topic (and why we’re here)

Search results for India’s defence R&D are dominated by two kinds of page. The first is exam-prep and current-affairs sites — UPSC coaching portals and daily current-affairs digests — which compress each missile into a bullet list of range, speed and “facts for the exam,” and treat the VijayRaghavan reform as a static set of recommendations to memorise rather than a process that is still contested and moving. The second is single-event defence-news coverage that captures one test or one budget line and then goes stale. Encyclopedic pages are accurate but static and rarely connect the test record to the structural argument about how DRDO delivers. IndiaStand’s structure is the differentiator: one maintained dossier on the institution (DRDO) with a 1958-to-present timeline, and this living topic brief that holds the current state of play across the demonstrated missile capability and the unsettled restructuring at once, separates what has been demonstrated from what is claimed or still in motion, attributes every claim to an official or reference source, and gets compacted as the picture changes instead of accreting one test at a time.

Maintained topic brief. Analysis by IndiaStand — it characterises the state of play and the range of positions actually held, attributes each claim, and makes no forecast and no recommendation.