In December 2025, India hosted the fiftieth-anniversary conference of the Biological Weapons Convention in New Delhi, and used the platform to present itself as a leading voice for biosecurity across the Global South. External Affairs Minister (EAM) S. Jaishankar told delegates from more than eighty countries that India was committed to full implementation of the Convention, and proposed a National Implementation Framework covering the identification of high-risk pathogens, oversight of dual-use research, and incident management.
India’s defence sector already offers a working template for what institutional depth looks like. Over the past five years, India has rebuilt the rest of its defence-industrial base around formal acquisition instruments, indigenisation targets and private-sector participation. However, biodefence has been left out from this template, consistent with today’s laggard capacities and catch-up policies that are responsive to threats as opposed to proactive, innovative policy. Biodefence architecture has instead survived on ad hoc, laboratory-led collaboration between the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and individual private partners, structurally disconnected even from India’s own civilian biomanufacturing policy.
This commentary argues that the gap between international posture and domestic institutional depth is the central issue for India’s biodefence-industrial base, and that its consequences will not stay confined to New Delhi’s bureaucracy. The sections that follow set out the acquisition architecture that biodefence was left out of, the parallel civilian-military disconnect this has produced, and why the resulting gap is a regional exposure as opposed to a domestic matter.
The Architecture That Biodefence Was Left Out Of
Since December 2021, India’s Ministry of Defence has published six Positive Indigenisation Lists, cumulatively covering more than 15,700 line-replacement units, sub-systems, spares and components that the armed forces are now required to source only from domestic manufacturers, private or public. This is the machinery behind India’s self-reliance rhetoric: it forces the services to buy indigenous, and it gives private industry a predictable, rules-based pipeline to invest against as opposed to a one-off contract to chase. DRDO’s own transfer-of-technology programme illustrates how the model is meant to work: since the indigenisation drive began, the organisation has signed dozens of technology-transfer agreements with domestic industry, converting laboratory-held know-how into licensed, at-scale private production across platforms ranging from missile sub-systems to avionics. As a result, India’s defence production hit a record 1.78 trillion rupees in FY26, more than double the figure from a decade earlier. Private industry’s share of that output has risen modestly, driven by the indigenisation lists rather than by voluntary market entry, with public-sector undertakings still accounting for roughly three-quarters of total production. However, biodefence or medical countermeasures have been categorically absent from all six lists. India’s actual capability in this space rests substantially on Defence Research and Development Establishment (DRDE) Gwalior, a laboratory dating to 1973 that stood up a BSL-4 facility in 2021, and on individual collaborations such as the October 2025 memorandum of understanding between DRDE and Bharat Biotech to jointly develop vaccines against mpox and Nipah virus. While these capabilities reflect technical achievements and some progress, biodefence technologies developed at DRDE have no equivalent transfer pathway to the one described above; each private collaboration is negotiated from scratch, with no acquisition instrument compelling a broader ecosystem to build capacity against a known demand signal. Biodefence has India’s scientists, but not India’s defence-reform machinery.
Two Tracks That Never Meet
This biodefence-industrial base gap is, however, not reflective of India’s broader biotechnology industrial policy. In August 2024, the Cabinet approved BioE3, Biotechnology for Economy, Environment and Employment, a substantial biomanufacturing programme run by the Department of Biotechnology. The policy envisions dedicated biomanufacturing hubs and biofoundries generating output across pharmaceuticals, precision therapeutics, climate-resilient agriculture and specialty chemicals, positioning biotechnology as a pillar of India’s economic strategy in the way electronics or semiconductors have become. BioE3 is ambitious, well-funded, and entirely civilian in design; nothing in its architecture links its output to DRDO’s defence requirements or to the biodefence establishment described above. India therefore runs two parallel biotech-industrial efforts that do not structurally connect to one another: one building civilian biomanufacturing capacity for economic and public-health goals, the other doing ad hoc defence biodefence research through individual laboratory partnerships. The legal scaffolding meant to eventually bridge or govern both remains thin. India’s biosafety regime still runs substantially on a 1986 environmental protection law, 1989 biosafety rules and a 2005 weapons-of-mass-destruction act, while a more comprehensive Biotechnology Regulatory Authority bill has stalled for years over its own definitions. The fact that EAM Jaishankar’s own BWC address had to propose a National Implementation Framework, rather than point to one already functioning, is itself evidence of the gap; India was asserting Global South biosecurity leadership at a conference it hosted, on the strength of a framework it had not yet built. On the country’s last published Global Health Security Index standing, it ranked sixty-sixth of one hundred and ninety-five countries. Capability without a bridge to deployment, and without the acquisition discipline applied elsewhere in defence, is what institutional hollowness looks like in practice.
Why This Is More Than A Domestic Concern
Pathogens do not stop at the acquisition gap, or at a border. Since mid-2025, clade 2.3.2.1a H5N1 avian influenza has produced sporadic but confirmed human cases in both India and Bangladesh, most recently in June 2026, alongside wider poultry outbreaks across the region. Both countries notified the World Health Organization of their cases individually, through their own national surveillance systems, because no shared regional mechanism exists to do so jointly. These are the kind of cross-border biological events a functioning biodefence-industrial base would need to help detect and respond to at scale, and a scenario in which India’s current model of one laboratory, one partner, one memorandum would struggle to meet domestic, let alone regional, needs. The point is not that India should build a separate regional institution instead of a domestic one. It is that a biodefence base organised on the same acquisition logic already applied to the rest of India’s defence sector would have obvious regional utility that the current model cannot offer, because it barely offers that utility to India itself. The region’s own manufacturing capacity compounds the waste: Bangladesh’s pharmaceutical industry alone now meets nearly all domestic demand and exports to more than one hundred and fifty countries, yet sits with no institutional link to its or the region’s biodefence effort at all. South Asia has no equivalent, in biosecurity, of even the imperfect acquisition reform India has built for itself in conventional defence.
Implications
Two implications follow from the argument developed above. First, biodefence and medical countermeasures should be brought inside the same self-reliance architecture that has reorganised the rest of India’s defence-industrial base, beginning with their explicit inclusion in the next Positive Indigenisation List, so that private capacity is built against a predictable acquisition pipeline rather than assembled through occasional memoranda. Second, BioE3’s civilian biomanufacturing capacity needs a structural, not incidental, link to DRDO’s defence requirements. India has potential and talent with biotechnology ambition, but it lacks a bridge between the ambition it already funds and the defence need it has. Neither change requires new legislation or a new ministry; both are extensions of instruments India already runs, applied to a sector currently exempted from them, which makes the gap more indefensible. Neither step would, on its own, close South Asia’s shared exposure to pathogens, but having a functioning domestic node is the precondition for one. Thus, India cannot credibly sustain the Global South biosecurity leadership it claimed to be offering in December 2025 on the strength of a domestic base it has not yet built.