Apart from all these we have now repeatedly been witness to the disheartening spectacle of overseas defence purchases being used as political boomerangs and bringing the acquisition process to a grinding halt; thereby affecting the combat capability of the armed forces.
The obvious panacea for this serious challenge is to encourage our indigenous R&D as well as industry and to become self-reliant as soon as we can. The navy’s recently established Directorate of Indigenisation has made a good start by focusing on the local production of systems and sub-systems of the Scorpene and the aircraft carrier projects and the response from the industry has been most encouraging. But the path of self-reliance is neither easy nor free of pitfalls, as we have learnt from experience.
Over the years, our DPSUs have been manufacturing many systems under so called ‘technology transfer’ agreements with foreign firms, but these have resulted only in transfer of ‘screwdriver technology’ and the assembly of CKD or SKD kits, with little or no value addition. That is the reason one has rarely heard of a DPSU producing an improved version of a product after paying huge sums for transfer of technology.
At the other end of the spectrum, the DRDO has often struggled for years at great expense to ‘reinvent the wheel’ when technology could have been acquired quickly and more economically from other sources. Time overruns and performance shortfalls in many of our indigenous programmes have led to upsets in our force planning process and created operational voids.
In a recent path-breaking initiative the navy and DRDO have signed a tripartite agreement with Israeli industry for the joint development by Indian and Israeli scientists, and subsequent co-production of a futuristic weapon system for our destroyers of Project-15A. The development cycle of the systems and delivery schedule of the system is planned to coincide so that these front-line ships would be commissioned with a weapon system, which is contemporary, and state-of-the-art worldwide.
An inherent conflict of interest arises from the fact that the DRDO tends to devote much greater resources to technology development and demonstration than to the urgent operational needs of the armed forces. This has often resulted in a mismatch between our critical needs and the priorities of DRDO; driving us towards the import option. There is obviously a need for much better alignment between the aims and objectives of DRDO and the operational missions of the armed forces. In 2004, the navy had drawn up, mainly for the benefit of DRDO, a 20-year Roadmap attempting to forecast the technology requirements that its operational commitments would demand in all three dimensions of maritime warfare. It would be appropriate for the DRDO to take such requirements into account and plan its budget outlay in consultation with the Service HQs.
While the media has recently had a field day lambasting the DRDO (using an equal mix of hyperbole and facts), the navy has traditionally maintained a symbiotic relationship with this organization through the three dedicated ‘Naval’ laboratories to immense mutual benefit. The fact that today the navy deploys DRDO designed sonars, radars, torpedoes, mines, ESM, ECM and communication systems, is ample proof of this. We are also funding and supporting the development of the LCA (Navy). However, we have only scratched the surface of the problem and have considerable ground to cover in the arena of self-reliance.
In this context we need to clearly understand that India’s claim to being a great power or an industrialized nation one day, will ring hollow unless we can acquire the competence to design and build our own ships, submarines, fighters, tanks, missiles and satellites etc. We also need to accept the likelihood that the first attempt at each of these undertakings may be flawed or even a failure. But had we never attempted to produce a fourth generation fly-by-wire fighter, an advanced light helicopter, a main battle tank or an intermediate range ballistic missile (or had we abandoned the projects half-way) it is unlikely that we could have bridged the huge resulting technology gap ever thereafter.
Therefore, a sensible and pragmatic option for the Service HQs today may be to accept the Tejas, Dhruv, Arjun and Agni in their present versions (with certain shortcomings) and dub them ‘Mark I’. Then the Services should demand that the DRDO produces “Mark II” versions of each of these systems and insist that those meet or exceed the SQRs in every respect.
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