Aluminium Extrusion Press: Rajnath Singh Performs Bhoomi Pujan at YIL Nagpur

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh performed the bhoomi pujan for a 10,000-tonne Aluminium Extrusion Press at Ordnance Factory Ambajhari in Nagpur on 19 June, a unit of the defence public sector undertaking Yantra India Limited. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis stood alongside him. The facility, once built, will rank among the most advanced of its kind anywhere in the country.

His framing of why it matters was blunt. "A nation capable of meeting its own requirements moves forward with the greatest confidence towards safeguarding its interests," he said.



The press is being pitched as a direct answer to an import dependency that has long sat under India's strategic manufacturing. It will turn out large and complex aluminium alloy profiles, the kind needed for defence platforms, aerospace and aviation structures, missile programmes, and the railways and transportation sector. Singh called the move a shift away from buying critical goods abroad towards making them at home, and described control over security-related necessities as something India can no longer treat as optional in the current geopolitical climate. Beyond the armed forces, the government expects it to strengthen the domestic supply chain and feed strategic sectors that still lean on imported extrusions.

Why an Aluminium Extrusion Press matters for defence platforms

Modern hardware is fussy about metal. Fighter jets, missiles and space programmes need alloys that are light and strong at once, able to hold up under conditions most materials would fail in.

"Such metals are produced through specialised processes. If the quality of the metal is superior, it will serve well in every situation," Singh said. He tied the point back to Operation Sindoor, where Made-in-India equipment did much of the work, and argued that the courage of soldiers needs to be matched by robust hardware built at home. The indigenous manufacturing of robust hardware is where he sees the gap closing, with thousands of small components giving a large machine its strength.

He also pushed back on the idea that conventional warfare is fading. War is changing and adversaries are harder to spot, he allowed, but the older means remain as relevant in 2026 as they were in 1947, and will stay relevant well into 2047. A strong military-industrial base, in his telling, is not a passing phase. He called the press a step towards meeting a major national need with the future kept firmly in mind.

The production and export numbers behind Aatmanirbhar Bharat

Singh placed the project inside the wider Aatmanirbhar Bharat push, which he said rests on four things: technology, workforce, knowledge, and faith in the nation.

The figures the Defence Ministry cited are the ones the government has leaned on through the year. Domestic defence production stood at Rs 46,000 crore in 2014. It has climbed to a record Rs 1.78 lakh crore in FY 2025-26. Exports tell a sharper story still, moving from under Rs 1,000 crore in 2014 to Rs 38,424 crore now. India, Singh said, is on course to hit its targets of Rs 3 lakh crore in production and Rs 50,000 crore in exports ahead of schedule.

From the Ordnance Factory Board to a corporatised YIL

YIL itself came out of the corporatisation of the Ordnance Factory Board, a restructuring Singh defended as the way to make a slow system quicker and more willing to take risks. Post-corporatisation, he said, OFB production has gone from Rs 12,755 crore in FY 2019-20 to Rs 26,282 crore in FY 2025-26. Exports across the new entities have jumped from Rs 81 crore to Rs 4,561 crore, with YIL accounting for Rs 397 crore of that.

Rajnath Singh's pitch on R&D and capital infusion

Two levers, he argued, decide whether an industrial entity stays in the game. One is research and development. The other is capital infusion.

On the first he kept it plain, that the organisations which back innovation lead and those that do not fall behind. On the second he made the case for new machinery as more than a budget line. Installing modern equipment, he said, brings a technological linkage into the manufacturing system itself, lifting efficiency and quality together. He told public sector enterprises to treat modernisation as a necessity rather than a choice, and asked the new DPSUs to study and borrow best practices wherever it helps them keep pace.

Fadnavis on Nagpur's place in defence manufacturing

Fadnavis called the press a major step towards Aatmanirbhar and Viksit Bharat. He said the world is now taking note of how fast India's defence sector is growing, and that the country is increasingly showing up as a seller rather than a buyer.

He returned to Operation Sindoor as well, describing it as proof of New India's technological reach, and credited the deepening tie-up between the DPSUs and private firms for much of the momentum. The Aluminium Extrusion Press, he said, should help Nagpur and the region around it become a serious player in defence manufacturing.

Secretary (Defence Production) Sanjeev Kumar, Joint Secretary in the Department of Defence Production Dr Garima Bhagat, and YIL Director (Operations) and CMD with additional charge Vijaykumar Iyer were among the officials present, along with defence forces officers and industry representatives.