India cannot become a “Viksit Bharat” unless the country develops and owns more of its own technology, Samtel Avionics CEO Puneet Kaura said on Sunday.
Samtel is a well-known defence avionics company which is now expanding its footprint in space tech and drone manufacturing.
Speaking at the NDTV Defence Summit 2026, Kaura said, “We will never be a Viksit Bharat till we actually have enough owned-in-India IP-wise technologies.”
#NDTVDefenceSummit2026 | “We will never be a Viksit Bharat till we actually have enough owned-in-India IP, IP-wise, technologies”: @SamtelAvionics CEO @PuneetKaura2104@AdityaRajKaul pic.twitter.com/JX6r9DxeNY
— NDTV (@ndtv) September 27, 2026
Kaura said that India needs to do more than just manufacture defence equipment. He stated that India has a big opportunity in areas such as drones, artificial intelligence, space, sensors and autonomous systems.
“Not just Make in India, but own in India,” Kaura added. He said that Indian companies need to develop more technology and intellectual property within the country and take them to global markets.
Samtel is already supplying products to multiple foreign air forces, including in Southeast Asia and Africa. It is also in talks with customers in the US.
The Samtel Avionics CEO said India also needs to build a stronger local ecosystem for drones. He pointed out that several important systems used in drones are still imported. These include autopilot systems, navigation systems, gimbals and payloads. “The real capability building that happens is not at the platform level, but at the level of tier one, tier two vendors,” Kaura said.
He said Indian companies need to work together to develop these systems within the country.
Kaura further said that artificial intelligence is also expected to become an important part of future defence systems. He asserted that AI can help with sensing, detection and identifying threats faster.
The Samtel CEO said India is still at an early stage in using AI in avionics, but defence customers are already asking for such technologies. “It’s obviously becoming very, very important and critical in terms of sensing, in terms of detection, how fast can we detect what we want to see, analyzing the threats at a very, very fast speed,” he said.
Kaura said that Samtel is also looking at opportunities in the space sector and exploring Internet of Things (IoT) technology, which could have applications in defence as well as agriculture, fisheries and railways.
It is also working on space debris management and has partnered with a Japanese company for this area.
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