Rajnath Singh Addresses 36th NDE Conference in Hyderabad

Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh on 15 November 2026 addressed, through a video link, the 36th Annual Conference on Non-Destructive Evaluation and Enabling Technologies together with the 15th International Symposium on Non-Destructive Testing in Aerospace. The three-day meeting has been organised by the Indian Society for Non-Destructive Testing at Hyderabad in Telangana, and more than 2,000 professionals, researchers, industry experts and students are taking part.

What non-destructive testing does

Non-destructive testing, or NDT, lets engineers judge whether a material, a component or a structure is sound without harming it. The Raksha Mantri drew the comparison with medicine: as ultrasound and X-rays let a doctor look inside a patient without surgery, these techniques find hidden flaws inside a critical part without taking it apart. As Indian defence systems grow more complex, he said, every material, assembly and process has to meet the highest standard, because a defect that goes unnoticed can cut the service life of equipment, raise the maintenance it needs and, at the worst moment, put a mission at risk. He asked the sector to move from merely catching defects to preventing them, with quality built in at each stage of manufacture.

The call for indigenous capability

He argued that India must not remain only a user of advanced technology but become a developer, an innovator and a global leader in critical fields. That requires home-grown strength in inspection technology, specialised sensors, evaluation equipment and the software that goes with them, which in turn reduces dependence on others and secures defence supply chains. Quality assurance practice, he said, should be consistent across the whole defence industrial base, with public sector undertakings, private manufacturers, start-ups and MSMEs all taking part, and inspection results must be accurate, reliable and traceable, resting on sound procedures, proper standards and assessment by qualified people. There can be no compromise, he insisted, on the integrity of test results in strategic uses. Self-reliance in defence, in his words, is not only an economic aim but a strategic necessity.

Technology, innovation and the ecosystem

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, advanced sensors, digital twins and predictive analytics are widening what inspection and structural health monitoring can do, making checks faster and more consistent and bringing out patterns that older methods would miss. The future, he said, lies in joining established inspection methods with these digital tools, and India should build its own solutions rather than simply buy them, investing in research, equipment, software and trained people so that Indian technology can also sell abroad. He pointed to Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) and the Technology Development Fund as mechanisms that have pushed experimentation in the sector, and cited missiles, naval platforms, aerospace engineering, radar and space work as evidence of growing capability, calling the commissioning of INS Vikrant, the country's first indigenous aircraft carrier, a landmark of that journey. Innovation, he added, flourishes when government, industry, academia and research laboratories work as one, and he asked for a whole-of-government and whole-of-ecosystem approach to technological advance and strategic self-reliance.