India’s defence start-up boom is outrunning its talent pipeline

2026 has proven to be the best year on record for India’s defence manufacturing sector, with the annual defence production reaching an all-time high of ₹1.78 lakh crore in FY 2025-26. Defence exports reached a record ₹38,424 crore in FY 2025-26, which is 62.66% higher than ₹23,622 crore the previous year, with Indian-made equipment now being exported to more than 80 countries.Indigenous defence production has quadrupled, rising from ₹46,429 crore in FY 2014-15 to ₹1.78 lakh crore in 2025. The government has set its sights on ₹3 lakh crore in annual defence production and ₹50,000 crore in exports by 2029, alongside achieving roughly 88% self-sufficiency in ammunition production. Moreover, the share of the private industry is also expanding rapidly. Its contribution increased to 24% of total output (around ₹42,000 crore) in FY 2025-26, up from 22% the previous year. Behind the headline numbers lies a more contested story: whether India has a sufficiently trained workforce to sustain this growth, and whether the engineering colleges, and State-run startup schemes can actually support this development. Interviews with founders, a former Navy officer-turned-entrepreneur, a materials science executive and an academic administrator suggest the sector’s talent problem is not a shortage of engineers, it is a shortage of engineers who understand what happens when a prototype has to survive a battlefield.The market is growing faster than the workforce that serves itIndia’s defence technology market alone, was valued at $7.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $19 billion by 2030 according to a private industry report by staffing firm Quess Corp. By 2030, technology-led systems are expected to make up almost half of India’s overall defence market, marking what the report calls a shift “from platform-driven development to advanced engineering and digital capability building”.The same report flags a structural problem: specialised roles in radar engineering, RF engineering, avionics, propulsion, optical engineering, quantum communications, systems integration, test and validation, and certification currently account for less than 5% of the existing defence workforce. Without targeted skilling, the report warns, 40-45% of these roles could remain unfilled by 2030, a gap that risks bottlenecking aircraft development, unmanned systems, naval projects and secure communications networks.Subbu Venkatachalam, Head of Defence and Aerospace at Carborundum Universal Limited (CUMI), frames the shortfall less as a numbers problem than as a preparation problem.A conventional engineering degree, he said, “is important, but the defence and aerospace sector requires specialised knowledge and exposure to real-world applications,” pointing to materials science specifically, which “sits at the intersection of physics, chemistry and engineering.”He said graduates who arrive with exposure to materials characterisation, computational modelling of material behaviour, additive manufacturing, and AI-driven materials discovery, on top of the fundamentals, will be preferred. Mr. Venkatachalam emphasised that hands-on internships matter because they let students “contribute from the start” rather than learning on the job for years.Mr. Venkatachalam also pointed to industry projections that India’s defence and aerospace workforce is expected to grow from around 1.8 lakh professionals to nearly 2.85 lakh by 2030, a scale of hiring, he argued, that makes fields like materials science a genuine career opportunity rather than a niche specialisation. He stressed that collaboration with accredited testing laboratories such as the Terminal Ballistics Research Laboratory (TBRL) and close engagement between industry, academia and the end user is what actually converts research into deployable material solutions.Gap between invention and deployment“A system that works in a lab is not the same thing as a system that survives a war”, said Pooja Yadav, founder, Astraniti. She said, “A system may work perfectly in a lab, but will it survive vibration, heat, dust, salt fog or electromagnetic interference? Can it integrate with an existing platform? Can the user operate it easily? Can it be repaired and manufactured repeatedly?” That systems-level thinking, they argued, is precisely what conventional engineering education leaves out. “In defence, an elegant prototype is only the beginning. The real engineering starts when you ask whether it can survive deployment.”Kiran Vagga, Founder and CEO of TISA Aerospace, said: “A prototype proves an idea; a deployable product must repeatedly meet requirements, be manufacturable and be maintainable.” The Astraniti founder extended the same idea: “A prototype proves the physics. A military product has to prove the entire system,” one that must keep working “after transportation,” integrate “with an existing platform,” and be repairable and manufacturable to a consistent standard by “another unit.”The gap between invention and deployment also shows up in how these companies actually allocate their engineering hours. Once a technology begins moving toward a military product, the Astraniti founder said, “a very significant amount of engineering effort shifts towards integration, testing, ruggedisation, reliability, documentation, qualification” work that is unglamorous but is what “gets you deployed.”Vagga’s account of TISA’s own workforce mix reflects the same reality: their team is roughly 85% engineering, spanning aerospace, mechanical, electronics, and software because, as she put it, “the aircraft must function as one integrated system.”Including veteransCdr. Arun Ravindranathan (Retd), who served from 1997 after schooling at a Kendriya Vidyalaya, was commissioned via the National Defence Academy and is now trying to build a defence hardware company .His verdict on that transition is blunt: “It’s difficult for an officer to enter the defence field.” He said his applications to the government’s own startup-support scheme, iDEX, were rejected in both 2024 and 2026, despite what he describes as direct operational knowledge of how naval systems are used, maintained, and procured. “The requirement of ‘connect’ within the defence ecosystem is essential,” he said. “The support is absent for retired personnel, unless connected to superiors.” “The iDEX started by helping young start-ups and MSMEs,” he said. “But now the contracts are won by big companies, who don’t need such handholding. So the concept of iDEX to encourage young companies is now gone, and very few small firms benefit. The bigger companies still get the grant when they already have good revenue being generated.” He called for an independent probe into the scheme’s effectiveness for the startups and MSMEs it was originally designed to serve.That critique lands against a scheme that has genuinely scaled. Launched in April 2018, iDEX was structured to fund up to nearly 300 startups, MSMEs, and individual innovators with ₹498.78 crore of budgetary support between 2021-22 and 2025-26. By late 2025, the programme had awarded roughly 650 contracts worth about $344 million (₹3,000 crore-plus) after receiving more than 10,000 applications since inception, with over 350 startups and 100 MSMEs actively engaged. The Ministry of Defence’s own iDEX portal describes the current network as engaged with over 650 startups and MSMEs across more than 50 technology domains. Despite the friction with iDEX, Ravindranathan’s company is moving ahead on its own: a prototype maritime unmanned craft, and separately, an in-flight urination device for female fighter pilots – both, he said, are being developed on contract rather than through an in-house team, to keep overheads low while a dedicated R&D and manufacturing team is structured. He is explicit about where he wants to recruit from once that hiring begins: not IITs or IIMs, but Tier 2 colleges. “I feel my experience can help bridge the gap,” he said. “I need enthusiastic young graduates from Tier 2 colleges, who don’t get a chance.” His hiring process, he said, will run every recruit through an internship first, “so that the capability and willingness to learn can be gauged,” with staffing of 10 to 12 people planned to begin this year.Pooja Yadavm, The Astraniti founder, who moved from technology product management into defence programmes before founding the company, described their own path into the sector as something built “part classroom, part programme office and part field reality” rather than through a formal defence engineering degree. They argue that veterans and young engineers are not interchangeable but are complementary: “An engineer can tell you whether a system works; an experienced operator can tell you whether anyone will actually be able to use it in battle.” A veteran, in their account, can surface things “that may never appear adequately in a written specification,” such as how equipment is actually handled under pressure, what maintenance constraints exist in the field, what a small design decision could make impractical in real use.Vagga described a similar division of labour at TISA: veterans bring “familiarity with user procedures and an understanding of field constraints,” while engineers bring design and development depth, and the two groups’ “close collaboration helps translate user needs into workable products.”Both companies also report giving engineers direct access to the end user rather than keeping that relationship at arm’s length: TISA said its employees “get opportunities to interact directly with soldiers, pilots, sailors or other end users,” and the Astraniti founder called that kind of direct field exposure “extremely valuable,” noting that “a five-minute observation in the field can sometimes expose an assumption that months of laboratory development missed.”Pooja said, pedigree is “one signal, not the final decision”; what matters more is “what someone has actually built,” whether they have debugged hardware, worked across software and electronics, or taken part in robotics, Formula Student, UAV projects or serious internships, and whether they can explain why something failed. I am less interested in whether a graduate has memorised defence terminology than whether they know how to attack a problem they have never seen before,” she said, adding that prior defence knowledge is useful but not mandatory for a young engineer, since “a technically strong and curious graduate can learn the defence domain.”TISA’s Vagga described hiring from Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 colleges alike, and from both IITs/NITs and State engineering colleges, running an “intern-to-hire” pipeline so that “fundamentals, project ownership and a practical assessment” can be judged directly rather than inferred from a transcript. She said TISA expects to keep expanding its team over the next 12–24 months as its development and production programmes grow, with a significant share of new roles open to fresh graduates, and named its priority skill areas as aerodynamics, structures, avionics, embedded software, controls, computer vision, manufacturing and testing.Non-engineering roles are also in high demand across the sector. Vagga said finance, procurement, supply chain, HR, business development and programme coordination are “essential alongside engineering.” The Astraniti founder was similarly direct: “A defence technology company cannot run on engineering alone,” listing programme management, product management, procurement, contracts, finance, compliance and policy as functions that “translate requirements into plans” and “make sure the product actually reaches the user”, noting that their own career, coming from product management rather than engineering, is itself an example of that path. Ravindranathan, more cautiously, agreed that “roles like business development, sales, finance, etc. will need specifically qualified personnel,” while noting his own company hasn’t staffed those functions yet.The institutional pipelineProfessor V. Ramgopal Rao, former Director of IIT Delhi, described how BITS Pilani has built formal infrastructure around this shift: the Centre for Research Excellence in National Security (CRENS) at its Hyderabad campus connects researchers across its campuses with the armed forces, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), security agencies and industry, working on autonomous systems, cybersecurity, perimeter security, digital forensics, advanced sensing, materials, AI and communications. BITS is also preparing to launch a new B.E. programme in AI and Autonomous Systems, combining robotics, embedded systems, control, computer vision, sensor fusion and communications, capabilities he said “future defence platforms will require.”He pointed to Apollyon Dynamics, a company founded by BITS Hyderabad students that started with drones built in a hostel and has since supplied indigenous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) designed around Indian Army requirements, as, in his words, “perhaps the clearest example of this growing interest.” He also cited AstroDeus, a BITS student startup developing an AI-powered loitering munition that was selected among the top six proposals nationally by the Army Design Bureau; Tonbo Imaging, founded by a BITS alumnus, which has built electro-optical and thermal-imaging targeting systems now used by armed forces in India and abroad; and Abyom SpaceTech and Defence, incubated at BITS Hyderabad and developing reusable propulsion systems.Professor Rao credited BITS’s Practice School system, up to seven and a half months of structured industry internships, as central to preparing this pipeline, and said the institute is bringing more defence and deep-tech companies into that network.But he, too, returned to the same refrain heard from the founders: “A degree title alone, however, will not prepare someone for this sector.” What defence companies need, he said, are engineers with fundamentals strong enough to work across electronics, mechanical systems, computing and materials, “build complete systems, test them rigorously and understand field constraints”, engineers who can “connect algorithms to hardware and prototypes to reliable products.”The road aheadThe numbers back up the scale of opportunity these founders describe, and the scale of the skilling problem. India’s Defence Acquisition Council approved a record ₹6.73 lakh crore in procurement for FY 2025-26. India’s overall defence budget has risen from ₹2.53 lakh crore in FY 2013-14 to ₹7.86 lakh crore for FY 2025-26, and 193 defence contracts worth ₹2,09,050 crore were signed in FY 2024-25 alone, with ₹1.82 lakh crore concluded in FY 2025-26 so far.Though India’s defence-tech market is projected to triple by 2030, nearly half of the specialised engineering roles this growth requires could go unfilled without deliberate skilling investment, according to the report. That is the gap startup founders and educators are trying to close: not by producing more engineering graduates, but by producing engineers who have actually broken something, fixed it, and understood why it failed before a soldier ever has to depend on it in the field.(Uttkarsha Shekhar is an independent journalist whose interests span defence, science, environment, education, entertainment and fashion.)