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'Raksha Shakti' — defence power — is the fifth of the seven 'Sapt Dhara' streams set out in the 80th Independence Day address, and was framed around one claim: there is no alternative to self-reliance in defence.
India was urged to move from being a market to being a global supplier of next-generation defence technology, with drones and counter-drone systems and leadership in hypersonics named as priorities, alongside cybersecurity.
The Prime Minister said work on Mission Sudarshan Chakra is progressing rapidly, and described a changed nature of warfare in which refineries, banks, data centres and factories can be targets rather than only the border.
On internal security, the address said armed Naxalism has been defeated but the 'Naxal mindset' survives, recalling that more than 3,500 police and security personnel died over four decades of the insurgency.
A vibrant national Civil Defence network of volunteers, equipped with modern systems, was announced on the reasoning that arrangements designed for the previous century's wars are now outdated.
Build an indigenous, multi-layered air and missile defence shield covering strategic and civilian assets.
Key: Announced in the 79th Independence Day address on 15 August 2025 as a ten-year national mission with a 2035 horizon, named after Lord Krishna's celestial discus. It is designed to combine surveillance, interception and counter-strike rather than interception alone, and to protect civilian infrastructure — hospitals, railways, places of worship — as well as military targets. The Ministry of Defence has described a medium-term phase to 2030 and a long-term phase to 2035, drawing on DRDO, defence PSUs and private innovators.
Bring startups, MSMEs, individual innovators and academia into defence and aerospace technology development.
Key: Launched in April 2018 at DefExpo. It is funded and managed by the Defence Innovation Organisation (DIO), which iDEX serves as the executive arm, and provides grants for prototype development through challenge-based competitions. This is the institutional route through which the address's call to harness youth capability in drones, counter-drone systems and cybersecurity is expected to run.
Reserve specified defence items for domestic procurement by placing an import embargo on them after a notified date.
Key: Introduced under the Defence Acquisition Procedure (DAP) 2020, with the first list promulgated in August 2020 and successive lists following. Items on a list can be procured by the armed forces only from Indian manufacturers — defence PSUs or private firms — after the date specified against each item. Separate lists exist for the services and for the defence public sector undertakings.
Provide a single framework for the counter-Left Wing Extremism effort across operations, intelligence and governance.
Key: Introduced by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2017. The acronym stands for Smart leadership, Aggressive strategy, Motivation and training, Actionable intelligence, Dashboard-based Key Result Areas and Key Performance Indicators, Harnessing technology, Action plan for each theatre, and No access to financing. It is the operational doctrine behind the shrinking of the 'Red Corridor' the address refers to.
The statute under which the announced volunteer network would be raised. It defines civil defence as measures 'not amounting to actual combat' taken to protect persons and property against attack from air, land or sea — before, during or after it — with the stated objectives of saving life, minimising loss of property, maintaining continuity of production and sustaining public morale. Administration rests with the Ministry of Home Affairs through the Directorate General Fire Service, Civil Defence and Home Guards, and the national advisory committee is headed by the Union Home Minister. The 'not amounting to actual combat' clause is precisely why the subject is a Home Affairs and not a Defence responsibility.
The capital procurement framework that replaced the Defence Procurement Procedure 2016. It created the Positive Indigenisation List mechanism and gives priority to the 'Buy (Indian-IDDM)' category — Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured — which is the procedural expression of the self-reliance argument made in the address.
The law under which the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and its front organisations are proscribed; the 'Naxal mindset' the address asks citizens to identify and isolate refers to over-ground sympathiser networks, which is where questions of proscription and free speech intersect.
The address names two capability gaps that sit at opposite ends of the cost curve, and both are consequences of the same shift. A hypersonic weapon travels above Mach 5 and, unlike a ballistic missile, manoeuvres within the atmosphere along an unpredictable path — which collapses the warning time an air defence network relies on and makes interception a computing problem as much as a missile problem. At the other end, a small drone can cost a few thousand rupees and still shut down an airport or damage a refinery; intercepting it with a conventional surface-to-air missile costs several orders of magnitude more than the drone, which is an unsustainable exchange ratio. Counter-drone systems — jammers, spoofers, directed energy, and gun-based hard kill — exist to fix that arithmetic. A layered shield of the Mission Sudarshan Chakra type has to answer both threats at once, and the address's mention of refineries, banks and data centres as targets is the reason civil defence appears in the same speech: the assets at risk are no longer only military.
Simple Analogy: Defending a city used to be like guarding one gate against a battering ram. Now it is guarding that gate against a ram that arrives too fast to see, while a thousand pebbles come over the wall at once — and you cannot answer every pebble with a cannonball.
Civil Defence under the 1968 Act and disaster response under the Disaster Management Act, 2005 both mobilise volunteers under the Ministry of Home Affairs, but they are distinct legal regimes: one is framed around hostile attack, the other around natural and man-made disasters. Civil Defence volunteers are frequently deployed in disaster relief, which is why the two get confused.
An export figure is the cleanest available proof of indigenisation, because a foreign buyer will not purchase a system that is merely assembled domestically. That is why the address pairs 'self-reliance' with 'global supplier' rather than treating them as separate goals.
The reference to daughters graduating from the National Defence Academy follows the Supreme Court's 2021 interim order permitting women to sit the NDA examination; the first batch of women cadets joined the NDA at Khadakwasla, Pune, in 2022, alongside earlier rulings granting permanent commission to women officers.
Placing cybersecurity inside 'Raksha Shakti' rather than inside the technology stream reflects the address's own framing of infrastructure — banking systems, data centres, refineries — as a warfighting target, which is the doctrinal basis for treating critical information infrastructure protection as national defence.
GS Paper 3 > Internal Security: Extremism, Security Challenges, and Indigenisation of Defence Technology
General Awareness > Defence Policy, Missions and Organisations
General Awareness > Defence and Current Affairs
General Awareness > Current Events
Defence indigenisation and Left Wing Extremism are near-annual UPSC themes across Prelims and GS Paper 3, and defence missions are a staple of CDS, AFCAT and CAPF general awareness.
A weapon travelling above Mach 5 that manoeuvres within the atmosphere, unlike a ballistic missile on a predictable arc — which sharply reduces available warning and interception time.
A notified list of defence items that can be procured only from Indian manufacturers after a specified date; introduced under DAP 2020.
The most-preferred DAP 2020 acquisition category, covering equipment Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured.
The belt of districts across eastern and central India historically affected by Left Wing Extremism.
A chip that works correctly on its first fabrication run, without a redesign cycle — used here as the benchmark of design maturity in the broader self-reliance push.