In late June, the Indian Navy and ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) finished negotiating the price of the largest defense contract India has ever written: roughly €8 billion for six submarines to be built in Mumbai. The money is agreed. The design is chosen. All that stands in the way of the signature, expected by September, is a technical review of a single question: Is the technology Germany is offering to hand over extensive enough to justify the price?
The roots of the deal lead back to January 12, when German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stood on the Sabarmati riverfront in Ahmedabad watching kites swarm the winter sky. It was Uttarayan, Indian’s western state Gujarat’s kite festival, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was at his side as well as 23 German CEOs who had accompanied the chancellor on his first Asian trip. The allegorical stories wrote themselves, but the contract was left unsigned. The two governments concluded an inter-governmental agreement on technology transfer, training, and export clearances, 19 MoUs, and a Joint Declaration of Intent on a Defense Industrial Cooperation Roadmap everything, that is, except the deal itself.
It was still unsigned when Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh flew to Berlin in April and toured the Kiel shipyard—a visit that left his German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, declaring himself “very, very confident” the contract would be signed within three months. Weeks later, Germany's ambassador in New Delhi, Philipp Ackermann, went further still. “I think we are a couple of weeks away from the conclusion of the agreement,” he told me. “Of course, it is the decision of the Indian side, it is their purchase.”
A recent Deutsche Welle report captured the outlines of this pursuit. What it did not unpack is the story underneath—the extent of the technological transfer. It matters, because Project 75 India (P75I) has quietly become the single most consequential test of whether Germany's Indo-Pacific strategy has operational substance or remains just a paper tiger.
India’s Undersea Capability Gap
In July 1999, India’s Cabinet Committee on Security approved what became known as the 30-year submarine plan: 24 conventional submarines by 2030, built in India, on two parallel lines—one Western design, one Russian—in a fully indigenous vessel, Project 76. It was among the most ambitious naval-industrial roadmaps any country had written.
Four years short of the deadline, India has exactly six of those 24 boats: the French-designed Scorpènes of Project 75, delivered a decade late.
The Russian line never materialized; P75I, originally conceived as the Eastern-design track, was repurposed in 2007 into something else entirely: a hunt for the most advanced conventional submarine technology on the market, Air-Independent Propulsion (AIP) above all.
The fleet the plan was meant to replace is still serving: Russian Kilos and German Type 1500s submarines bought in the 1980s, kept alive by upgrade after upgrade. Meanwhile, China has normalized its deployments in the Indian Ocean and Pakistan has inducted Yuan-class derivatives. That is the arithmetic pressing on every Indian negotiator: 18 boats behind, two ageing classes retiring, one production line running.
Indian Navy veteran Vice Admiral Kishore Thackeray, who is now an independent consultant, has watched the whole arc. He was the commissioning engineer of INS Shalki, the first submarine ever built in India, from German kits, at Mazagon Dock in the early 1990s and later ran the Advanced Technology Vessel program that built India’s nuclear-powered submarines.
“It is the most complex piece of engineering that a human being has ever made,” he said of the conventional submarine in a recent interview, quoting his predecessor at the program.
A conventional boat, he notes, is at least 10 times more complex than the most advanced jetliner. “India has mastered the nuclear kind. It is the conventional kind, the bread-and-butter boat, that keeps sending New Delhi back to the market.”
Germany’s Return
In a way, Germany has already done in the past what India is now demanding.
Under the 1981 agreement, India bought two Shishumar-class (Type 1500) boats from Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW) in Kiel and assembled four more at Mazagon Dock from German kits, with German engineers on the shop floor.
As a December 2025 study by the Council for Strategic and Defense Research (CSDR), an independent defense think tank in New Delhi, records, that program transferred real submarine-building expertise and made Mazagon Dock India’s foremost naval yard. But in 1987, kickback allegations around the HDW deal exploded into scandal; the fifth and sixth boats were cancelled, the German yard was blacklisted for years. The charges eventually dissolved without convictions. India’s plans for more German boats, however, dissolved with them.
The industrial relationships passed to France and Russia. When Paris won the Scorpène contract in 2005, it inherited the position Germany had abandoned. And Germany’s return was not straightforward, either. After P75I request for proposals went out in July 2021 under India’s Strategic Partnership model, TKMS, which had summited a bid a year earlier, declined, citing, in CSDR’s account, the “high indigenous content proportion and nearly unlimited liability on the foreign technology partner.” The terms were, in the company’s judgment at the time, commercially untenable.
Two years later, TKMS returned to substantially the same terms. The company formalized a joint bid with state-owned Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders (MDL) in June 2023, during German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius’ visit to India. By January 2025, the competition had narrowed to a single compliant bidder: The rival Larsen & Toubro–Navantia offer, an Indian-Spanish co-effort, failed due to a requirement only the Germans could meet—a sea-proven fuel-cell AIP system. The technology lets a conventional boat hold its breath for weeks rather than days.
When contract negotiations formally opened in Mumbai in September 2025, TKMS CEO Oliver Burkhard framed the ambition in terms that went well beyond six hulls. “I am convinced that India will develop into a global center for submarine technology and manufacturing,” he said. “Our partnership with MDL is based on trust, innovation, and shared goals that go far beyond individual contracts.”
Indeed, TKMS’ framing of technological transfer is maximalist. “We define it as a no-holds barred transfer of technology in line with the Modi government’s Make in India push,” a company spokesperson told me. It is precisely that claim the Indian government’s evaluation group is now testing against the contract’s fine print.
A Broader Strategy
That audit reflects a broader strategy that European capitals persistently misread. India is not a large, price-sensitive arms market to be won; it is running a deliberate policy of extracting maximum technology while diversifying dependence.
Russian platforms are being retired or relegated. France is embedded through the Rafale and Scorpène ecosystems. The United States supplies enablers and holds out the prospect of deeper undersea cooperation. And Germany is now being offered the underwater domain and naval cooperation.
Each supplier receives a share of the market in exchange for a share of its intellectual property. Competition among them is the mechanism by which the terms of transfer are bid up.
Every clause of the Make in India framework is conditioning market access on local production and technology transfer; thus, it serves that architecture as applied to this tender. The evaluation group grading TKMS’ package is not bureaucratic friction; it is the strategy, operating as designed.
Building a New Generation of Conventional Submarines
What India is buying, it should be said plainly, is a submarine that has never been built. It is a heavily enlarged hybrid of Germany’s U-212CD class: Where the standard boats Germany and Norway are buying displace around 2,800 tons, the Indian variant is projected at 3,400–3,500 tons submerged, nearly double the Kalvari-class Scorpènes, with space for a scaled-up AIP plant, bigger batteries, indigenous combat systems, and a vertical launch system for land-attack cruise missiles.
The German AIP that India inspected was proven at sea on a 2,000-ton Type 214. Scaling it to a 3,000-plus-ton boat is engineering, not paperwork, which is precisely why the Navy demanded a sea-proven core. As a well-connected defense analyst who requested anonymity, told me, the Indian defense ministry reckons that thus 80 percent of the propulsion is already de-risked and the remaining 20 percent is manageable development.
Why would TKMS sell a boat it has never built? Two uncharitable readings—that Kiel does not trust India with its best design, or that India is being used as a paying test-bed for a new concept—mostly miss how the choice was made. The specification is Indian, not German. The Indian Navy’s staff requirements call for a boat of over 3,000 tons with vertical launch tubes and the endurance for long Indian Ocean patrols, and no submarine in the German catalogue does that.
The 212CD now being built for Germany and Norway is a NATO boat in a more literal sense than usually appreciated: Its signature technologies are alliance-restricted, and its design is optimized for the Baltic and North Atlantic, not the Arabian Sea. The 214 is the export line and licensed 214s have been built from South Korea to Turkey. So, if India had wanted a proven boat off the shelf, one existed. New Delhi deliberately chose a submarine that does not yet exist, because helping to design it is precisely the competence it is trying to buy.
The corollary is equally deliberate: As lead customer, India knowingly carries the first-of-class risk delays, integration problems, and cost growth. The sea-proven-AIP clause was included to cap that sort of risk at the propulsion plant, the part of a submarine that is hardest to fix later.
The propulsion question is best kept separate from the hull question, because contractually it is separate. The fuel-cell AIP plant is a modular hull section: Its transfer manufacture, integration, maintenance, upgrade rights would be required whichever hull India bought, and grading the depth of that transfer is the evaluation group’s core task.
The link to the hull is indirect but real. A standard boat could accept a standard module; scaling the plant for a 3,400-ton design forces German and Indian engineers into joint development. That, more than any single clause, is why the enlarged design serves the logic of Make in India: it converts the transfer from a license into a collaboration. In terms of delivery dates this means: roughly two years of design work after signature before steel is even cut, six to seven years to the first boat, then one boat a year. Sign in late 2026, and the first submarine commissions around 2033; the sixth arrives near 2040, a decade after the 30-year plan promised all 24.
The Indian Navy’s own leadership does not dispute this. “Considering the timelines involved, the first submarine is expected to be inducted by 2033, followed by the delivery of one submarine every year until 2038,” the outgoing naval chief, Admiral Dinesh K. Tripathi, confirmed in his last interview in that role.
The Rebellion at Home
None of this is uncontested in India. Within Indian defense circles, three rival scenarios have been mentioned.
The first: Why not simply build more Scorpènes? The tooling exists, the workforce is trained, the supply chains in place, the crews already operate the class, and India ordered three additional boats from France in February 2025 following exactly that logic. Deepening the French line, its advocates argue, keeps a door open to bigger prizes: a conventional derivative of the Barracuda, which would amount to French help with India’s nuclear boats.
The second: Why Germany at all, when Spain’s bid came with a promise of 100 percent technology transfer and a lower price? Furthermore, India’s own Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the state military R&D agency, has an AIP system in testing that could have been fitted to the Spanish hull. The counterargument is, for now, decisive: Navantia’s S-80 development history included a fatal buoyancy miscalculation that required US consultants to fix. And a partner who must run to Washington to rescue its own design is a risky foundation for a boat India intends to modify heavily.
This touches on the Indian Navy’s deepest institutional instinct: never again bet the fleet on an unproven promise.
The third case is the most radical: Building a fully indigenous submarine.
Vice Admiral (ret.) Thackeray is the most credentialled advocate for this option. “We need to take that leap of faith, have confidence in ourselves,” he told me, reeling off what India already makes: torpedo complexes, sonars, periscopes, combat systems, modular accommodation. In short, “80 percent of the boat. What is remaining is only the will.”
His former colleague, Admiral Raman Puri, concurs: A foreign Original Equipment Manufacture (OEM) “will give you know-how. But there will be no why.” Build-to-print teaches assembly, not design and without the why, India cannot even modify what it builds.
Behind that argument lies a memory that explains India’s entire technology-transfer doctrine. During the Kargil war in 1999, Thackeray recounts, the Indian Navy wanted to surge its German-built SSKs to sea, but some of their US-made periscopes were in the United States for overhaul, paid for, and Washington refused to return them, on the grounds that they might be used against Pakistan. “If you have to beg,” Thackery says, “you cannot be a world leader.”
Every clause India now writes about depth of transfer, source codes, and design authority is linked to that afternoon. When Indian negotiators press TKMS on whether the transfer includes the why, they are not haggling. They are remembering.
Design transfers the why, not merely the how. This is now the official standard the Indian Navy has set for itself in public. Whether the TKMS package actually meets it, or delivers only manufacturing know-how, is precisely what the evaluation group is now closely examining.
Germany’s Strategic Opportunity
The German side of the ledger is more ambiguous, and the ambiguity is the analytical heart of the matter.
Start with the money. TKMS was spun out of ThyssenKrupp and listed in Frankfurt in October 2025; on debut its shares surged from €60 to €100, a valuation built on order-book expectations. The company is the inheritor of the HDW yardthat built India’s Shishumars and a six-boat program with a 30-year support tail is transformative for a firm its size. The commercial motive is clear.
But the political ground has moved, too. Germany’s 2024 Focus on India paper committed Berlin, in the strategy’s own words, to “expand its arms cooperation with India” and “improve the reliability and predictability of arms export control procedures.”
India is now treated, for export purposes, roughly on par with Australia and Japan—unthinkable under the old “areas of tension” military exports doctrine that for decades made every Indian request a political trial.
Pistorius calls India Germany’s most important strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific; Ambassador Ackermann, asked about the relationship this spring, described it as a partnership that has moved past symbolism into industrial substance.
“That includes, of course, common maneuvers, working together, armed forces with armed forces, but also defense production and cooperation in projects,” he said in an interview at India International Centre, New Delhi. And he was candid about what Berlin sees: “I think there is a very interesting future for both sides, not only for the Indian side when it comes to German defense production, but also for the German side when it comes to Indian defense work.”
Whatever the final decision on the P75I deal, as outgoing Admiral Tripathi said, it is “as much about strategic capability as it is about submarines.”
Gaurav Kumar is a researcher and journalist associated with United Service Institution of India, New Delhi, the country’s oldest defense think tank.
