Which of the following defence platforms are part of India’s growing indigenous military ecosystem supported by the Make in India initiative?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, More than one of the above. Exactly two of the three named platforms are Indian, and they are (b) MBT Arjun and (c) ATAGS; the third, the F-35 Lightning II, is American and fails the test outright. Because two options qualify and no single lettered option can hold both, the combined code is the only choice that can be marked. Take them in turn. Arjun is India's own main battle tank: the programme was authorised in 1974, the Combat Vehicles Research and Development Establishment was raised under DRDO in 1976 expressly to build it, design work ran from 1983 to 1996, and the tank entered service with the Indian Army in 2004, the 43rd Armoured Regiment receiving it first. It carries a 120 mm rifled main gun and indigenous Kanchan composite armour, and it is manufactured at the Heavy Vehicles Factory, Avadi, near Chennai. ATAGS is India's own towed howitzer: a 155 mm / 52-calibre gun developed by DRDO's Armament Research and Development Establishment, Pune, with Bharat Forge Limited and Tata Advanced Systems Limited as production partners, with a stated range of more than 40 km. On 26 March 2025 — barely six months before this paper — the Ministry of Defence signed contracts worth roughly ₹6,900 crore for 307 ATAGS guns and 327 High Mobility 6x6 gun-towing vehicles, enough to equip 15 artillery regiments, and it did so under the strictest procurement head available, Buy (Indian–IDDM). The F-35 Lightning II is none of this. It is a fifth-generation stealth strike fighter built by Lockheed Martin of the United States with Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, descended from the X-35 that won the American Joint Strike Fighter competition against Boeing's X-32 in 2001; it first flew on 15 December 2006 and is flown by the US services and a set of NATO and allied air forces. India neither designs it, builds it, nor operated it as of the September 2025 exam. Both Arjun and ATAGS are named, in one sentence, on the Government's own April-2025 listing of platforms whose development Make in India enabled — a list that also runs to the Dhanush Artillery Gun System, Light Specialist Vehicles, High Mobility Vehicles, LCA Tejas, the Advanced Light Helicopter, the Light Utility Helicopter, Weapon Locating Radar, 3D Tactical Control Radar and Software Defined Radio. The F-35 appears on no Indian indigenous list, and never could.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The only genuinely false item, and the one that unlocks the question. The F-35 Lightning II is a Lockheed Martin fifth-generation stealth fighter of United States origin, produced in three variants — the conventional-takeoff F-35A, the short-takeoff/vertical-landing F-35B and the carrier-capable F-35C — and funded principally by the US Department of Defense with NATO and Australian participation. It is not an Indian programme, is not made under Make in India, and India did not operate it as of the 13 September 2025 exam. Once you see that (a) is out, the question can only resolve to a combined option, because a single-item answer would mean the other two both failed.  (b) True, but incomplete — which in this format means wrong. Arjun is India's indigenous third-generation main battle tank, designed by DRDO's Combat Vehicles Research and Development Establishment, armed with a 120 mm rifled gun, protected by Kanchan armour and built at the Heavy Vehicles Factory, Avadi; the Mk-1A weighs about 68 tonnes against the Mk-1's 58.5 tonnes. It is on the Government's Make-in-India list by name. But ATAGS is on the same list, so marking (b) alone reports half the correct answer and the paper's own code sends you to (d).  (c) Also true and also incomplete. ATAGS is a 155 mm / 52-calibre towed howitzer from DRDO's Armament Research and Development Establishment, Pune, produced with Bharat Forge and Tata Advanced Systems, ranging beyond 40 km — and it is the flagship Buy (Indian–IDDM) artillery order of 2025, 307 guns plus 327 towing vehicles for about ₹6,900 crore signed on 26 March 2025. Everything the option says is correct. It still is not the answer, because Arjun is equally correct, and a question that offers 'More than one of the above' is asking you to count qualifying items, not to pick the best one.

Concept: 'Make in India' in defence is a procurement-category story rather than a slogan, and the categories are what the question is quietly testing. The initiative was launched on 25 September 2014 with defence manufacturing among its original sectors, and the Defence Acquisition Procedure grades every purchase by how much of the design and the manufacture is Indian. The strictest head is Buy (Indian–IDDM) — Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured — where an Indian agency must have designed the platform and Indian firms must build it, with a minimum indigenous content. Below that sit Buy (Indian), Buy and Make (Indian), and at the far end plain Buy (Global), which is simple import. Arjun and ATAGS sit at the strict end: DRDO laboratories designed them, Indian public and private firms build them. That distinction matters because 'assembled in India' is not the same as 'made in India' in the policy sense — a licence-built foreign design transfers jobs but not intellectual property, and it is the design ownership that lets a country upgrade, export and re-engineer the platform later. The supporting machinery is now substantial: 16 Defence PSUs, more than 430 licensed companies and roughly 16,000 MSMEs, with the private sector accounting for about 21% of defence production; over 14,000 items have been indigenised through the SRIJAN portal, and more than 3,000 of the 5,500 items on the five Positive Indigenisation Lists had been indigenised by February 2025. An imported platform, however capable, sits outside that ecosystem entirely — and that is exactly the line the examiner is asking you to draw.

State PCS 2025 Q32 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q32 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer