India's Military Space Build-Out Goes Private - and the Subsystem Dependency Shows

At the Paris International Space Summit on 9-10 September, three India-France private-sector deals plugged Indian firms into SBS-III, India's Rs 26,968 crore military-surveillance constellation of 52 satellites. The anchor deal has France's Safran supplying the communication, inertial-navigation and optical subsystems to Dhruva Space - a reminder that India's space privatisation still rides on imported high-value payloads.