The government’s Technology Development Fund (TDF) scheme, which aims to encourage the participation of public and private industries especially MSMEs and startups to design and develop defence technologies indigenously, has supported 16 MSMEs and 20 startups since January 2022.
Sharing data in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha on Friday, Minister of State in the Defence Ministry Sanjay Seth said Rs 120 crore has been allocated since January 2023 and Rs 43.89 crore has been disbursed as grant-in-aid to the industries under the TDF scheme.
Moreover, during the last five years, 42 projects of Rs 182.41 crore to MSMEs and 25 projects of Rs 59.47 crore to startups have been sanctioned under the scheme. As of now, 26 technologies have been successfully developed, Seth said.
Earlier this year, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh had launched the Acing Development of Innovative Technologies with iDEX (ADITI) scheme with a corpus of Rs 750 crore for startups for innovations in critical and strategic defence technologies through grants of up to Rs 25 crore for research, development, and innovation in defence technology.
The scheme is operational for the period 2023-24 to 2025-26 and falls under the iDEX (Innovations for Defence Excellence) framework of the Department of Defence Production, Ministry of Defence to develop around 30 deep-tech critical and strategic technologies in the proposed timeframe.
In October this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had hailed the new C-295 aircraft manufacturing facility in Vadodara by Tata and Airbus. PM said the new complex will benefit micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the country.