India has emerged as the world’s second-largest arms importer with an 8.3% share in global weapons imports between 2021 and 2025, just behind Ukraine, that is in a war with Russia for the last four years, borrowing weapons from Western nations.
A Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report, released on Monday (March 9, 2026), said Ukraine accounted for 9.7% of the world’s arms imports for the same five-year period.
The annual report on ‘Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2025’, however, noted that India’s dependence on foreign weapons and military systems was reducing compared to the five years between 2016 and 2020.
“Indian arms imports fell by 4.0 per cent between 2016–20 and 2021–25,” the SIPRI report said, partly attributing the decrease to India’s growing ability to design and produce weapons and defence systems indigenously, although domestic production was often substantially delayed.
One more reason for the falling arms imports of India was the Indian government’s push for ‘Make in India’, Aatmanirbharta (Self-Reliance) in defence manufacturing, and the insistence on foreign vendors sourcing more from India in military procurement programmes.
The SIPRI noted that India’s plans to buy 114 Rafale jets from France and six advanced conventional submarines from Germany to be built at the state-run Mazagon Docks and Shipbuilders Limited indicated that New Delhi’s dependence on foreign arms supplies would continue.
The report noted that Russia, France, and Israel continued to be the top three arms suppliers to India during the five years 2021-25, though the Indian dependence on Russian weapons has largely reduced and moved towards Western supplies, including the US.
“Russia’s share of Indian arms imports dropped from 70 per cent in 2011–15 to 51 per cent in 2016–20 and then to 40 per cent in 2021–25,” the report recorded. Between2021-25, France and Israel supplied 29 per cent and 15 per cent of India’s imports respectively.
SIPRI attributed India’s growing arms production and large imports to its border tensions with arch-rivals China and Pakistan, which have led to armed conflicts in the last five years, including the 2020 Ladakh conflict with China that ended in 2024 and the May 2025 Operation Sindoor against Pakistan.
Incidentally, Pakistan was the world’s fifth-largest importer of arms, with a 4.2% share in global weapons imports. Between 2021 and 2025, Pakistan’s arms imports grew by 66% from the 2016-2020 period.
Pakistan’s arms imports accounted for 80% from China, with Turkey and the Netherlands being the second and third largest weapons suppliers.
The US was the world’s largest arms supplier, accounting for 42% of all weapons exports in the 2021-25 period, going up from 36% in the 2016-20 timeframe. The US exported arms to 99 countries globally, including 35 in Europe, 18 in the Americas, 17 in Africa, another 17 in Asia and Oceania region, and 12 in West Asia.
France was the second largest exporter of arms during the 2021-25 period, with a 9.8% share in all global weapons exports. Russia came third, while Germany overtook China to become the fourth-largest arms exporter during the same timeframe.