From Challenge to Contract: iDEX, India's Deep-Tech Support Architecture in 2024, and How Start-ups Can Serve Critical Infrastructure Protection

B.A.P-I Retrospective, 2020 to 2024. This paper looks back at 2024 and the lesson it holds for the protection of India's critical infrastructure.

1. Introduction

Every serious programme for the protection of critical infrastructure eventually confronts the same difficulty. The threats evolve faster than the procurement cycles of the institutions that own the assets, and the technologies needed to meet them, sensing, autonomy, secure communications, artificial intelligence for anomaly detection, are increasingly produced not by large incumbents but by small, young firms. The question is how a state brings the two together without either wasting public money on prototypes that are never bought or locking its infrastructure into technologies that are never tested.

In 2024 India's defence establishment had a working answer to that question in Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX). This paper looks back at the iDEX model and at the wider start-up and deep-tech support architecture as it stood in 2024, with some account of what followed, and asks how its lessons can be carried over to the protection of civilian critical infrastructure. The argument is that iDEX's real innovation was institutional, not financial.

2. The iDEX Model: A User, a Problem and a Route to Purchase

iDEX was launched by the Prime Minister at the tenth DefExpo in Chennai on 12 April 2018. It is the executive arm of the Defence Innovation Organisation (DIO), a not-for-profit company under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013, whose founding members, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), provided initial funding of Rs 100 crore; it received budgetary support of Rs 498.8 crore for 2021-22 to 2025-26, intended to support about 300 start-ups and MSMEs and about 20 partner incubators, with grants of up to Rs 1.5 crore, or up to Rs 10 crore under iDEX Prime (Ahmed, 2024, Jul. 19). Its partner list includes the Technology Development Fund of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Startup India, the Atal Innovation Mission and NITI Aayog (iDEX, n.d.).

What sets the model apart is the Defence India Startup Challenge (DISC), in which the armed services publish problem statements and start-ups compete to solve them. One finds that the measure of success shifted, by 2024, from the number of grants given to the number of contracts signed and products bought. iDEX signed its 300th contract in December 2023 and its 350th on 25 June 2024 (Ahmed, 2024, Jul. 19). In October 2024 the Defence Minister reported that 26 products developed under iDEX had attracted procurement orders worth more than Rs 1,000 crore, that acceptance of necessity and requests for proposal worth over Rs 2,380 crore had been issued for 37 more, that iDEX had received over 9,000 applications, and that more than 450 start-ups and MSMEs were working with it (ETV Bharat, 2024, Oct. 8).

3. 2024: ADITI and the Turn to Deep Tech

The year's most important change came on 4 March 2024, when the Acing Development of Innovative Technologies with iDEX (ADITI) scheme was launched at DefConnect 2024 in New Delhi. With an outlay of Rs 750 crore for 2023-24 to 2025-26, ADITI offers grant-in-aid of up to Rs 25 crore to develop about 30 deep-tech critical and strategic technologies; its first edition carried 17 challenges from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Defence Space Agency, and investor partnerships under the iDEX Investors Hub were reported to have raised pledged funds from Rs 200 crore to more than Rs 500 crore (ADU, 2024, Mar. 5). By October a second edition carried 19 challenges, alongside 41 challenges in the twelfth DISC round (ETV Bharat, 2024, Oct. 8).

The scheme recognised what the original grant ceilings had made plain: hardware deep tech cannot be prototyped on Rs 1.5 crore. Even so, ADITI covers up to 50 per cent of the product development budget, which leaves the start-up to find the rest, and an analysis by the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA) observed that the Rs 25 crore cap can still limit hardware prototyping (Ahmed, 2024, Jul. 19).

4. The Reform Agenda Within the Model

The same analysis identified the areas where the model could be strengthened further. Procurement quantities and timelines for iDEX winners were undefined; winners faced high development costs and delays with the defence establishment as their sole buyer; efforts overlapped with DRDO's Technology Development Fund; and the so-called valley of death between prototype and order remained the central challenge (Ahmed, 2024, Jul. 19). Raising national research and development spending, then 0.64 per cent of GDP, is part of the same agenda (Ahmed, 2024, Jul. 19), and the Government has since moved decisively on it.

The wider national architecture has addressed the funding side with growing ambition. The Economic Survey of 2023-24 recorded more than 1.17 lakh start-ups recognised by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), up from about 300 in 2016, about 13,000 of them working in artificial intelligence, the internet of things, robotics and nanotechnology (Inc42, 2024, Jul. 22). The Fund of Funds for Startups, launched in 2016, eventually committed its full Rs 10,000 crore corpus to 145 alternative investment funds, which invested over Rs 25,500 crore in more than 1,370 start-ups, and a second fund of Rs 10,000 crore prioritising high-technology areas that need patient capital was approved in February 2026 (PMO, 2026, Feb. 14). A draft National Deep Tech Startup Policy, released in July 2023 by the office of the Principal Scientific Adviser, listed among its aims access to funding, a stronger intellectual property regime, shared infrastructure and the promotion of procurement and adoption (Business Standard, 2023, Jul. 31). In July 2025 the Cabinet approved a Research, Development and Innovation scheme with a corpus of Rs 1 lakh crore, to be routed through the Anusandhan National Research Foundation largely as long-term loans at low or nil interest for projects at higher technology readiness levels (PMO, 2025, Jul. 1). Patient capital, in other words, is now available at a scale India has not seen before. The complementary task is to grow assured demand at the same pace, and iDEX itself shows how that is done.

5. Carrying the Model to Critical Infrastructure

For so far as critical infrastructure protection is concerned, the relevance of iDEX lies in its demand side. A grid operator wanting drone detection over a substation, a port seeking underwater surveillance of its approach channel, a water utility looking for anomaly detection in its control systems, a railway zone needing landslide or flood sensors along a vulnerable section: each is, in principle, a DISC-style problem statement. The opportunity in the civilian sectors is to create an institution on the iDEX pattern that collects such problems, publishes them, funds the solutions and, crucially, commits a named owner to buy what works.

The author's proposed national resilience architecture offers a natural home for such a mechanism. A Bharat Infrastructures Protection and Critical Assets Resilience Directorate (BIPCARD), operating under the National Security Council, could run a resilience challenge on the iDEX template, drawing problem statements from sectoral operators and regulators (Dash, 2025, Jan. 30). The Bharat National Resilience Index (BNRI) could then serve as the yardstick by which adopted technologies are judged, so that a start-up's success is measured by a demonstrable improvement in a sector's resilience score rather than by a demonstration alone (Dash, 2025, Oct. 28).

6. Build a Challenge-to-Contract Pipeline for Resilience

Keeping this into consideration, three recommendations follow. First, a civilian counterpart to iDEX should be created for critical infrastructure, with problem statements set jointly by operators and regulators in power, telecommunications, water, transport and ports, and with procurement commitments attached to each challenge from the outset, so that the valley of death is bridged by design rather than by luck. Second, the deep-tech funds created between 2023 and 2026 should reserve a window for resilience technologies, since patient capital without an identified buyer merely relocates the risk. Third, trusted-supplier rules should be written in advance, so that start-ups serving critical infrastructure know the security vetting, data handling and testing standards they must meet before they bid.

What comes through from the iDEX record is that Indian start-ups will solve hard problems when someone with the authority to buy states the problem clearly and keeps the promise to purchase. The protection of India's critical infrastructure offers many such problems. Giving them an iDEX-style buyer would be among the most cost-effective resilience investments available to the state, and it would build on a model India has already proved.