India’s Department of Atomic Energy is among the signatories of the 20 Memoranda of Understanding signed on September 23, 2026, at the Defence & Aerospace Industry Day, hosted at the Hyderabad campus of BITS Pilani. Alongside it, the Nuclear Fuel Complex also took part in the strategic discussions, reaffirming the role of the civil nuclear sector within India’s broader national security research architecture.
The event, jointly organized by BITS Pilani and the Defence Institute of Advanced Technology (DIAT) in Pune, brought together around 200 representatives from 45 defence companies and organizations. Senior officials from DRDO, the Department of Space, MIDHANI, BEL, HAL, Kalyani Group, and Paras Defence were among those in attendance. The 20 MoUs involve BITS Pilani, DIAT, and industrial partners such as Larsen & Toubro PES, Bharat Forge, VEM Technologies, Skyroot Aerospace, and Sigma Aerospace. The agreements cover collaborative research, technology development, technology transfer, and joint commercialization.
The event also featured a showcase of 48 indigenous technologies, spanning advanced materials, electronics, autonomous systems, sensors, and aerospace engineering. The stated goal was to move research from academic settings toward operational and deployable capabilities. Professor G. Satheesh Reddy — a member of the National Security Advisory Board and former DRDO chairman — emphasized that BITS and DIAT are well-positioned to become significant partners in the country’s translational defence research.
The participation of the Department of Atomic Energy and the Nuclear Fuel Complex is far from incidental. The DAE oversees India’s entire nuclear fuel cycle, from power reactors to advanced materials research programmes also relevant to missile and space applications. Their presence at a defence-focused event reflects a well-established pattern: in India, civil nuclear expertise and strategic security capabilities are mutually reinforcing, within a system aimed at achieving technological self-reliance by 2047 — a target formalized by the Nuclear Energy Mission in the 2025–26 budget and reaffirmed by the DAE in July 2026.
The institutional partnership between BITS Pilani and DIAT Pune has deeper roots: a framework MoU was first signed in December 2024, giving rise to the Center for Research Excellence in National Security (CRENS) at BITS Pilani as the operational hub for these agreements. That platform now serves as the node through which joint projects, hybrid certification courses, and the sharing of laboratories and academic staff between the two institutions are channelled.
What emerges from Hyderabad is a system consolidating structural ties between universities, industry, and strategic government agencies — the nuclear sector included. For India, bringing the DAE and the Nuclear Fuel Complex into the defence research network means building cross-cutting expertise that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. If the agreements reach their operational phase on schedule, the Hyderabad campus could become one of the most active hubs for technology transfer between nuclear research and national security applications.
