GLOBALISING ARMS PRODUCTION

Arguing why Indian arms production needs to move beyond "Make in India" to "Make Indian in a global environment", AMIT GUPTA suggests that a beginning can be made with an Indo-Russian partnership in Central Asia

In a promising development, India and Russia have recently exchanged a paper on jointly producing weapons in the Central Asian states. This is an imaginative idea that fits into not only the Indian government's manufacturing policies but also the way India’s private industry is investing in countries across the world, including the purchase of defense production facilities. Moreover, such a move would help enhance India’s foreign policy goals and allow it to take advantage of global scientific labour, something that has been done by countries as varied as the United States, China, and even North Korea. Global intellectual labour and weapons development

Since the Second World War, the development of weaponry has been helped by the use of global intellectual labour. The United States was able to build the world’s first nuclear weapons because it was able to acquire European scientists like Fermi, Szilard, and Einstein who were fleeing the Nazis. Later, the United States’ missile and space programmes employed foreign scientists the most important of whom was the developer of the German V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun—he went to become the head of the United States’ successful Apollo programme that put a man on the moon. Similarly, the global dominance of Silicon Valley comes from the large pool of immigrant labour in the information technology industry and by some estimates some fifteen percent of IT startups in California’s tech industry are done by people of Indian origin.