Technology Transfer And Intellectual Property In India's Defence Procurement
Nandan Rathi, Maharashtra National Law University, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar
ABSTRACT
Technology transfer (ToT) is what converts a defence platform purchase into indigenous design capability, and its absence is what leaves a purchase a purchase. This paper examines the intellectual property architecture underlying ToT in Indian defence procurement (patent licensing, trade secret and know-how transfer, technical data rights, and joint-IP ownership) and evaluates the adequacy of India's current legal framework, which rests principally on the Defence Acquisition Procedure, DRDO transfer-of- technology policy, and platform-specific contracts rather than any dedicated defence-technology statute. It analyses six case studies: the 2016 Rafale acquisition and the ongoing Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft negotiations with France; the Su-57/Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft engagement with Russia; the competing Rolls-Royce and proposed Safran-GTRE arrangements for the AMCA Mk2 engine; the BrahMos joint venture; the Barak-8/MR-SAM programme with Israel; and the sixteen-year Javelin procurement journey with the United States. These are read against the United States' own export- control practice, principally its country-specific restrictions on F-35 sales and licensing friction over the F414 engine, with the statutory prohibition on exporting the F-22 Raptor cited as the outer limit of that practice rather than as the primary comparator. The paper identifies the absence of a dedicated defence-technology IP framework, weak institutional absorption capacity, and a misaligned offset policy as India's principal structural weaknesses, and proposes a tiered technical-data-rights regime, mandatory absorption audits, and a statutory default rule for jointly generated IP as corrective measures. A methodological caveat applies throughout: several of the deals discussed remain live and unsigned as of late August 2026, and the source base necessarily mixes official material with defence trade press of uneven reliability, a limitation addressed directly in Part I.
Keywords: Technology Transfer; Defence Procurement; Intellectual Property; Offsets; Export Control; Atmanirbhar Bharat; ITAR; AMCA; know-how and know-why.
