Lasers cut and weld metal in factories across India, and most of the machines doing it are fibre lasers.
The beam is generated inside a strand of glass rather than a gas tube or a crystal, which makes the design compact and efficient.
Almost none of those machines are built here, and the reason sits deeper in the supply chain.
The fibre at the centre of the laser determines how the whole system performs.
Specialty fibres of that kind are made by a small number of suppliers worldwide, and none of them is in India, so an Indian manufacturer building a laser starts by importing the part that matters most.
