India needs concentrated tooling hubs for advanced manufacturing for aerospace and space domain: S Somanath

Former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman S Somanath on Tuesday said there is an urgent need to develop tooling hubs in India to truly scale advanced manufacturing. He emphasised that India must create focused, concerted manufacturing ecosystems similar to those in China.

Speaking at the Accel Advanced Manufacturing Summit in Bengaluru, Somanath said India lacks an ecosystem for aerospace manufacturing. “Distributed hubs across the country are not a good idea for sectors like aerospace. We need concentrated hubs where all players are aggregated, coupled with institutions that add value to research and innovation,” he said.

He highlighted that specialised skills such as tooling are often not addressed in the domain. “We need people with great knowledge in tooling processes, metallurgy, materials manufacturing, machine tools, process engineering, and automation,” he said, while discussing India’s next decade building frontier tech capabilities.


Somanath also pointed out that while Indian rockets are witnessing strong global demand, the lack of sufficient supply remains a bottleneck that needs immediate attention. “Manufacturing becomes the crux of the problem. The ability to manufacture and launch in a short period is essential,” he told startups looking to build in the space sector, highlighting that mass manufacturing in satellites and small launch vehicles will be needed to capture the global market.

Space startups and deeptech investors also echoed his thoughts and said that for India, space as a defence technology has come much later, and there are areas where it still needs to play catch-up.

Agnikul Cosmos CEO Srinath Ravichandran said the way to address the gap is not to mimic the SpaceX model but to build from scratch. “Everyone wants to go build a SpaceX, but that may not be the easiest way to build rockets,” he said, adding that instead of replicating the model, solutions can be built from the Indian context for the world.

Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner at deeptech venture capital firm Speciale Invest, which has backed several spacetech startups, believes, “There are certain places we (India) can leapfrog, like in-orbit servicing or any action that you can do in orbit. That’s very much a level playing field. Maybe the West is just two or three years ahead of us, and India can compete there.”