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Chinks in the Armour – What ail DRDO, India’s Premier Defence Organigation?

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Rediff.com – News-Special Part- III

‘DRDO took up Arjun before it learnt to make tanks’

George Iype

Some 20 years ago, the defence ministry entrusted the DRDO with two projects: the development of a battle tank and a multi-barrel rocket launcher system.

The DRDO called the former, assigned to it in 1974, Arjun, and the latter Pinaka.

Two-plus decades later, the Arjun is considered a major failure. And so is the Pinaka. The Indian army found the latter passed only seven of its 29 requirements.

Defence experts allege that DRDO continues to work on Arjun and Pinaka just to keep its laboratories open.

“The Arjun main battle tank is not world class and has failed to meet the required levels of accuracy. But DRDO is keeping it alive because it does not want its factories to close down,” says Major General (retd) Ashok Mehta.

Experts like Major General Mehta feel the Arjun could have been a tank with potential if DRDO had got its act together. But the premier defence research organisation continues to exert pressure on the army to accept a limited series of production for the Arjun.

Army officers say it is politics and not the tank’s potential that is at work in the defence ministry, which last year placed orders with the Avadi Ordinance Factory to manufacture 124 Arjun tanks.

“I am happy to inform you that not only is the army satisfied with the Arjun tank’s performance, but it has placed an order for 124 more such tanks,” Defence Minister George Fernandes had told Parliament. “With this India has achieved the capability for indigenous manufacture of battle tanks.”

Army officials, however, say no other defence agency in the world must have spent 25 years and Rs 3.5 billion on developing a tank that has failed to perform.

“We have wasted money and time in producing a tank that is just not a world class product these days,” an army officer in Hyderabad says.

Insiders say the army was not “satisfied with the Arjun’s performance” as Fernandes claimed, but was coerced to accept it by the DRDO.

N K Mohan Pillai, a retired army officer who witnessed the Arjun trials, says the tank lacked three vital strengths. First, its engine is weak. Second, its suspension needs permanent maintenance. Third, its gun control is not accurate enough to obtain first round kill probability.

“In fact, the main problem was that DRDO took up the Arjun project before learning how to make tanks,” Pillai remarks.

In 1994 when DRDO announced that the Arjun tank was ready for production, then army chief General B C Joshi witnessed the trials. He sent a note to the DRDO and the defence minister saying the tank fails to meet standards and therefore was unacceptable. General Joshi then laid down a dozen imperatives that DRDO should take to improve upon the tank.

General Joshi’s main concerns were that the tank that weighs 57 tonnes lacked armour protection and vital suspension for crew comfort and gunfire accuracy.

But DRDO, which has showcased the Arjun as its finest indigenous product, claims that the problem is not with the tank, but with the army.

“The army is used to handling only T-72 tanks. For the soldiers who have fired T-72 tanks, operating the Arjun is a gigantic task. So we have told the army to train their crew before accusing us of inferior production,” a DRDO engineer says.

Despite DRDO’s claims, many in the army believe that the 124 Arjun tanks will drain the exchequer just like the multi-barrel rocket launching system Pinaka did.

In 1999 the Comptroller and Auditor General severely indicted DRDO for its failure to develop critical components for Pinaka after spending Rs 424.5 million on the project.

The defence ministry had entrusted DRDO with the Pinaka project in 1980. The deadline given was 1994. Twenty years later DRDO is nowhere near finishing. The war heads and all the three vehicles necessary for launching the rockets are yet to be developed by DRDO. Against the requirement of eight types of warheads, only three have been developed. Of this, one is not acceptable to the army and the other is only a dummy.

“The delay in the development of the EWPinaka has compelled the army to depend on our existing 20 kilometre-range system even during Kargil conflict. The DRDO is entirely responsible for this,” charges an army officer.

According to experts, the Pinaka system has met just seven of the 29 requirements of the army during trials. The indigenous rocket launcher lacks the promised range, fire power, loading time of the salvo and deployment time.

These, however, are “minor problems” according to DRDO.

Drdo

Chinks in the Armour – What ail DRDO, India’s Premier Defence Organigation?

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Rediff.com – News-Special Part- I

‘How long should we wait?’

George Iype

DRDO is responsible for indigenising and constantly upgrading the country’s weapons and equipment inventory and related supplies. But the dilemma has always been to determine the correct balance between make or buy.
The Kargil Review Committee Report
Make. Or buy?

That has been a longstanding issue between the DRDO and the Services. The former complains that the armed forces make impossible demands. The Forces say the DRDO has failed to develop the frontiers of defence technology. And that its claim to produce anything and everything has virtually strangulated critical defence exports.

Experts say it was in fact the collapse of the Soviet Union that drove home the urgency to reduce dependence on external suppliers and rely on indigenous defence production. “Thus over the years, the DRDO has been volunteering to produce virtually anything for the Indian forces. The result is that it has now accumulated nearly 1,000 projects. The DRDO does not have the capability to accomplish some of these,” says Rajendra Mohan, an independent defence analyst in Hyderabad.

According to Mohan, the DRDO promises to make anything for the Forces simply to keep many of its laboratories running. “Or else, some of the labs would have already been shut,” he points out.

Experts like Mohan argue that the very method of calculating the indigenisation content of defence development and production is a matter of debate. Over the years, the government has set up 10 committees under the Department of Defence Production to identify the scope of items such as aircraft, electronics warfare systems and armament. Based on their reports, the government had been claiming for more than a decade that the self-reliance and indigenisation content will be brought up to 70 per cent before 2000.

The core point as per this plan is minimising imports and inducting indigenously designed and manufactured systems. The stress was on increased research and development and the DRDO was the agency to implement it.

But last year, the government — after a thorough review of the DRDO — admitted that the indigenisation level still remained at only 30 per cent. It then quickly created a Self Reliance Implementation Council, chaired by then DRDO chief and now scientific advisor to the prime minister, Dr Abdul Kalam. The Council’s aim is to take indigenisation to 70 per cent by 2005. But many believe like all other DRDO targets, this deadline would also slip.

DRDO scientists claim they have made significant achievements on indigenisation and in their efforts to meet the requirements of the armed forces. They include flight simulators for aircraft, 68mm reusable rocket pod, brake parachute for fighter aircraft, mini remotely-piloted vehicle, light field gun, a new family of light weight small arms systems, charge line mine-clearing vehicle for safe passage of vehicles in the battlefield, and illuminated ammunitions for enhancing night fighting capabilities in their list of achievements.

The DRDO has also developed a cluster weapon system for fighter aircraft, naval mines, next generation bombs for high speed aircraft, low-level tracking radars Indra-I and II for the army and air force, light field artillery radar, battlefield surveillance radar, advanced ship sonar systems and torpedo launchers.

“Our biggest success and pioneering work has been the testing five nuclear devices during May 11-13, 1998 in the Pokhran range,” claims a DRDO scientist.

In collaboration with the Department of Atomic Energy, DRDO in fact designed, tested and produced advanced detonators, ruggedised high volt trigger systems, interface engineering, systems engineering and systems integration to military specifications for the nuclear blast.

“Like the nuclear bomb project, several high-technology projects are in various stages of design and development. Therefore, it is ridiculous to allege that we are a useless bunch of scientists for the armed forces,” the scientist adds.

Indeed, the problem is that for years DRDO has been enmeshed in several high-technology projects that no one really knows when the armed forces will be able to induct.

“DRDO has been acting like a dog in the manger. The agency has considerably torpedoed our efforts to import state of the art equipment because it has been boasting to make every available defence equipment that we demand,” an army officer says angrily.

For instance, he says, though the defence ministry sanctioned competence build-up projects for the multi-barrel rocket launcher Pinaka in the 1980s, DRDO is nowhere near accomplishing the target. The delay has forced the army to continue to depend upon their existing outdated system, whose range is much less compared to that envisaged for Pinaka.

Concerned about terrible delays in some of the vital projects, the army, the air force and the navy are these days asking just one question: “How long should we wait?”

For the Forces, these projects are lifelines. They include India’s indigenously built surface-to-air missiles Trishul and Akash which were to have replaced the Russian-supplied OSA-AK and Kvadrat systems in 1990. Then there is the most ambitious multi-role fighter, the light combat aircraft, the indigenous production of which DRDO has been grappling with in the last 17 years.

The main battle tank Arjun, incorporating state-of-art tank technologies with superior fire power, high mobility and excellent protection has been developed by DRDO. But the army is unhappy with its performance.

There are growing concerns among the Forces, and politicians and defence experts about the terrible delays of the DRDO and its ability to keep promises. For at stake is not just the concept of indigenisation, but a huge investment of more than Rs 150 billion that the government has made for the last two decades on various projects. Would the money be completely wasted?

“Weapon systems face obsolescence very fast. So the DRDO will have to either give up some projects or reorient its functioning,” says Mohan.

Yet, DRDO has been mouthing the political platitude of indigenisation by postponing the deadlines of LCA, Pinaka, Trishul, Akash, nuclear submarines and several types of electronics warfare systems for the army, air force and navy.

The Kargil conflict last year exposed the chinks in DRDO’s armour. None other than Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee echoed the Forces’s worries when he told DRDO directors on August 6, 1999: “Technology needed for mountain warfare is to be given the highest priority.”
But the biggest worry for DRDO is not the bureaucratic delays and sanctions, but the Indian air force. Faced with diminishing number of its ageing fleet, the IAF holds DRDO responsible for promising to deliver the LCA before year 2,000, thereby considerably upsetting many of its aircraft acquisition plans.

Suspecting that DRDO will never deliver the LCA, the IAF has now embarked on an ambitious project to upgrade 100 MiG-21 aircraft.

Despite the heavy odds, DRDO still remains confident that it will roll out the country’s first indigenous aircraft before 2002.

“We will induct 200 LCAs into the Indian Air Force between 2003 and 2010,” Dr Abdul Kalam told a group of aeronautical scientists before he handed over DRDO’s charges to Dr Vasudev K Aatre.

But there aren’t many who believe that promise will be fulfilled.