New Delhi: Inside the buzzing halls of a Delhi defence expo in the summer of 2012, something unusual sat quietly in a corner. A made-in-India artillery gun. While foreign stalls drew crowds with glossy brochures and polished pitch decks, this indigenous weapon from Bharat Forge attracted little more than chuckles.
Uniformed officers walked by, barely giving it a glance. Some scoffed. Others smirked. Nobody stopped. At the time, the idea that an Indian private firm, better known for automotive parts, could build heavy weaponry was, to many, laughable.
But behind that gun was industrialist Baba Kalyani, a man with a clear vision and a thick skin. The 2008 global financial crisis hit many manufacturing businesses hard. For Baba Kalyani, it forced a rethink. Rather than shrink, he chose to pivot. His background, years in military schools, friendships with top brass and a lifelong fascination with engineering, nudged him toward defence.
By 2011, he was asking why India cannot make its own artillery guns. The answer, at the time, was policy bottlenecks, an import-first mindset and a closed defence ecosystem controlled by public sector undertakings (PSUs).
But Kalyani saw opportunity where others saw red tape. Artillery, after all, was steel and engineering – Bharat Forge’s bread and butter.
He was not naive about the system. He approached it methodically, even knocking on the doors of the highest offices. Then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh passed him to Defence Minister AK Antony. The meeting lasted less than 20 minutes. The outcome: a polite thank you and a dead end.
There was no space for private players. And even though India had received full technology transfer from Sweden post-Bofors, that tech never made it beyond dusty files and state-run factories. The belief was foreign defence firms meant quality, and Indian firms meant risk.
Turning Point
Change did not happen overnight. But it did begin slowly in late 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the ‘Make in India’ campaign. Kalyani was there. For the first time, private players were invited to the policy table. His experience, insights and persistence found a place in the conversation.
The breakthrough, however, came with the late Manohar Parrikar, India’s defence minister at the time. He understood both the strategic need and the bureaucratic chokeholds. Under his leadership, India rewrote its defence procurement policies in 2016 – a move many credit for unlocking the gates for private industry.
To understand how long this change was overdue, Kalyani’s son, Amit, shared a haunting anecdote. In the late 1970s, Baba Kalyani had submitted a proposal to manufacture a key defence item. That proposal gathered dust for four decades. By the time Parrikar saw it in 2016, the same equipment was still being imported.
When asked why countries like South Korea or China managed to scale their defence production while India lagged, the answer was India trusted only its public sector. Innovation suffered under the weight of audits, paperwork and a fear of risk.
“You spend Rs 100 and someone from the finance department will grill you for a week,” Kalyani once remarked.
Creativity could not breathe in that climate.
Fast forward to today. Bharat Forge is no longer a curiosity in defence exhibitions. Its artillery guns are being tested, deployed and even exported. The same generals who once ignored the prototype now study it closely.
What changed? A mix of policy reform, entrepreneurial courage and a refusal to accept the status quo.
In the end, the laugh was on those who never looked.
