The Israel-India Technology Corridor: Defense, Cyber, Water, and Pharma
The largest bilateral technology trade relationship Israel maintains outside the US. Cumulative arms sales near $20.5B through 2025. Bilateral exports up from $200M (1992) to $2.5B (2024). The Atmanirbhar Bharat shift from finished-goods supply toward co-production.
Quick Answer
The Israel-India corridor is the largest bilateral technology trade relationship Israel maintains outside the United States, with cumulative arms sales of approximately $20.5 billion through 2025 (SIBAT) and total bilateral exports rising from $200 million in 1992 to $2.5 billion in 2024. The relationship is structurally evolving from procurement-based supply toward co-production and co-development under India's Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliance) framework, with implications for the industrial architecture beyond raw export volume. India was the largest importer of Israeli weapons in the 2020-2024 window; that share has compressed as India diversifies suppliers and increases domestic production.
Key Facts
- Cumulative Israeli arms sales to India: approximately $20.5 billion (SIBAT, through 2025).
- 2024 Israeli defense exports to India: approximately $1.1 billion; 2025 preliminary estimate above $1.5 billion (SIBAT).
- India accounted for approximately 37-40% of Israeli arms exports in the 2020-2024 window.
- Total Israeli exports to India: $2.5 billion in 2024, up from $200 million in 1992.
- Indian arms imports concentration: Israel was the fourth-largest supplier in the 2014-2024 window, behind Russia, France, and the United States.
The relationship in numbers
The Israel-India commercial relationship operates at several distinct layers, each with its own scale and dynamic.
Total bilateral trade stood at approximately $2.5 billion in Israeli exports to India in 2024, up from $200 million in 1992 — a roughly twelvefold increase over three decades, with growth concentrated in the past fifteen years. India is currently Israel's seventh-largest trade partner globally.
Defense trade has been the bedrock of the relationship since the early 1990s. Cumulative SIBAT-reported Israeli arms sales to India total approximately $20.5 billion. The 2017 sale of Barak air-defense systems produced a peak year at approximately $3.4 billion. Subsequent years saw consolidation: 2023 at approximately $880 million, 2024 at approximately $1.1 billion, and 2025 preliminary estimates above $1.5 billion.
Non-defense technology — water, agritech, cyber, pharmaceuticals — represents a smaller share of bilateral trade by volume but a larger share of institutional engagement, with extensive Israeli participation in Indian smart-city, water-management, and food-security programs.
Adjacent trade through the broader India-UAE-Israel triangle — the IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) framework, Adani Group's 2023 acquisition of Haifa Port for $1.18 billion, and the bilateral logistics architecture — extends the corridor beyond bilateral measures.
The four functional layers
The Israel-India corridor operates across four functional layers.
Defense systems and platforms. Israeli defense exports to India have historically concentrated in radars, surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), guided bombs, and electronic warfare systems — categories where Israeli industrial position and Indian procurement priorities have aligned. Major Israeli defense exporters — Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Elbit Systems — each operate substantial Indian subsidiaries and joint ventures.
Joint manufacturing and co-production. Under India's Atmanirbhar Bharat framework, Israeli defense exports to India increasingly require local production of 50-60% of deal value within India. The Adani-Elbit joint venture for Hermes 900 UAV production in Hyderabad — manufacturing drones used both for the Indian military and for export back to Israel — is the most-cited example. A reported $3.3 billion deal for 425,000 carbines through a joint Israeli-Indian venture illustrates the scale of the co-production layer.
Cyber and digital infrastructure. Israeli cybersecurity capability has been deployed into Indian defense, critical infrastructure, and government IT systems. The institutional engagement runs alongside private-sector cyber commerce.
Water, agritech, and adjacent strategic industries. Israeli water management, drip irrigation, and agricultural technology have been deployed at scale across Indian states, supported by government-to-government cooperation frameworks and Israeli industry presence in Indian state-level programs.
The structural shift: from supply to co-creation
The most analytically significant feature of the current Israel-India corridor is the structural shift from procurement-based supply toward co-production and co-development. The shift is driven primarily by India's Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliance) framework, which prioritizes domestic Indian production of defense systems and constrains the share of procurement deal value that can be supplied as finished goods from abroad.
The consequences are visible in the data. Israel's share of Indian arms imports — approximately 34% in 2015-2019 — has compressed to single digits by 2025 as India diversifies suppliers and increases domestic production. But the absolute volume of Israeli-Indian defense trade has continued to grow, because the relationship has shifted from finished-goods supply toward joint manufacturing within India.
From the Israeli industrial perspective, the shift produces structural advantages and disadvantages. Joint-venture and co-production structures embed Israeli industry more deeply in the Indian economy and create longer-tenured commercial relationships than discrete procurement transactions. They also transfer engineering capability and intellectual property in ways that traditional export sales did not, with implications for the durability of Israeli industrial advantage in specific systems.
The IMEC and the regional logistics architecture
The Israel-India corridor connects to a broader regional logistics architecture through the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), the post-2023 framework linking Indian, Arab Gulf, Mediterranean, and European ports and rail networks. Haifa Port — acquired in January 2023 by an Adani Ports / Gadot consortium for $1.18 billion (Adani 70%, Gadot 30%) — is one of the principal Mediterranean nodes in the IMEC architecture.
The IMEC remains a partly aspirational framework, with implementation conditional on regional security conditions, infrastructure investment, and the broader Israel-Arab normalization trajectory. But the architecture creates a structural rationale for sustained India-Israel commercial engagement beyond the bilateral defense relationship.
What to watch
Three structural questions shape the corridor's trajectory.
The Atmanirbhar Bharat absorption. As India's domestic defense-production capability matures, the volume of bilateral Israeli-Indian trade in finished defense systems will continue to compress. The question is whether the joint-venture and co-production layer expands fast enough to offset the compression in finished-goods supply.
The regional security environment. Israeli defense exports globally are exposed to the 2023-2026 regional security environment and the political response of buyer economies. The Indian market has remained, per the available reporting, relatively insulated from the broader pressure — Indian-Israeli defense supplies were "uninterrupted" through the post-October 2023 period, even as approximately $1.5 billion in Israeli arms exports to other countries were delayed.
The IMEC implementation. Whether the broader logistics-and-trade corridor architecture moves from framework to operational reality, and at what speed, will shape the non-defense trade trajectory.
Why It Matters
The Israel-India corridor is the most consequential bilateral technology trade relationship Israel maintains outside the United States, and it is in active structural transition — from finished-goods procurement toward co-production. The transition is reshaping which Israeli industrial capabilities are valuable in the relationship, which engineering and IP flows occur, and which long-tenured institutional relationships form. Mapping the architecture, not just counting transactions, is the prerequisite to understanding where the corridor is going.
Sources: SIBAT (Israeli MoD International Defense Cooperation Directorate); Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI); Globes; The Jerusalem Post; Algemeiner; Times of Israel; Foundation for Defense of Democracies; ThePrint. Data current as of Q2 2026.
Related in The Olam: Strategic Technology Trade · Defense · Trade Corridors · Ports & Logistics · Adani-Haifa Port Concession