Mahindra Defence Systems Limited

Mahindra Defence Systems is the defence business of the Mahindra group, and it has taken a narrower path than most Indian conglomerate defence arms. Rather than chasing platform primacy across every domain, it has concentrated on protected mobility, underwater warfare and airborne surveillance electronics, three areas where an automotive engineering base and a set of foreign technology partnerships could be turned into production work. The company supplies the Army, Navy and Air Force as well as paramilitary and state police forces, and it exports armoured vehicles through a Gulf operation.

Land systems are the best known part. Defence Land Systems India, the Faridabad operation originally set up with BAE Systems, produced the Mine Protected Vehicle India, a 6x6 mine-resistant carrier built for anti-insurgency work. Alongside it sit the Rakshak, an armoured light utility vehicle on a Mahindra jeep chassis of which several hundred serve with the Rashtriya Rifles and police units, the Marksman armoured personnel carrier, and the Axe light strike vehicle. The current flagship is the Armoured Light Specialist Vehicle, marketed as the Armado, an Indian-designed 4x4 with ballistic protection to B7 and STANAG level II, a multi-fuel diesel engine and run-flat tyres. The Ministry of Defence contracted 1,300 of them in March 2021, and variants cover troop carriage, ambulance, command and control, mortar carrier and ammunition roles.

The naval systems unit at Pune has grown into the more technically demanding half of the company. It supplies torpedo defence systems, decoy and torpedo launchers, sea mines and large composite structures used in defence and space applications. Its biggest win came in 2021, when the Ministry of Defence placed an order worth about 1,350 crore rupees for fourteen Integrated Anti-Submarine Warfare Defence Suites, each combining an in-line active and passive low frequency variable depth sonar with torpedo detection, classification and defeat, for delivery through to 2030. Defence electronics run through Mahindra Telephonics Integrated Systems, the joint venture with the American radar house Telephonics, covering maritime surveillance radar such as OceanEye, airborne search radar, identification friend or foe equipment and mobile surveillance systems. Vehicle armouring is handled separately by Mahindra Emirates Vehicle Armouring, with plants in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan serving civil and government customers in the region. The through line across all three units is integration rather than invention. Mahindra takes a proven subsystem, a sonar, a radar, an armour package, and builds an Indian product and an Indian supply chain around it, which is precisely what the Ministry of Defence indigenous content rules reward. That is a quieter position than designing a platform from nothing. It has also kept the company in steady production while several more ambitious Indian defence ventures stalled between prototype and order.