Unfortunately, if we looked the DRDO Chief legacy since Arunachalam till date Dr Sameer V Kamat was the weakest chief ever seen by DRDO. He received the crown on the juncture. when Dr G. Satheesh  Reddy was unprecedentedly stepped down with unvisible reason for sake of national interest or……

Dr. Kamat treated this prestigious position with great casualness; the proof of this lies in the work he undertook throughout his entire tenure—including two extensions—and the outcomes of those efforts, which are clearly visible in the current state of the DRDO.

There is a difference between occupying a chair and wielding the authority that comes with it. There is a still wider difference between administering an institution and leading one. The tenure of Dr. Samir V. Kamat as Chairman of the Defence Research and Development Organisation demands a hard, unsentimental reckoning — not because DRDO deserves to be diminished, but because DRDO is too important to be allowed to drift.

For decades, DRDO has shouldered one of the most consequential mandates in the Indian national-security establishment: building the technologies on which this country’s strategic autonomy actually depends. From missiles to radars, electronic warfare to aerospace, naval systems to unmanned platforms, its scientists have proven again and again that India possesses the intellectual firepower to solve extraordinarily hard defence problems. But brilliance in the laboratory cannot indefinitely paper over rot in the corridor. And it is in the corridor — not the lab — that the Kamat years raise their sharpest questions.

A MOMENT THAT DEMANDED COURAGE

Kamat took charge in August 2022, inheriting an organisation already under fire for delays, cost overruns and chronic mismanagement. This was not a caretaker’s job. It was a mandate for institutional courage — a call to confront a system choking on procedure, competing fiefdoms and decades of accumulated inertia.

Instead, the question that came to define his chairmanship was blunt and uncomfortable: where was the transformation?

The government’s own high-powered committee, led by K. Vijay Raghavan, was convened to find out. Its verdict was not kind. It found that nearly 60 per cent of project delays traced back to internal failures — including the absence of critical technologies at decisive stages — with the remainder split between shifting service requirements and plain bureaucratic red tape. That finding should have triggered an institutional earthquake. Instead, reform became just one more battlefield inside an organisation already exhausted by them.

Kamat’s tenure did not end with his original term. He was extended — not once, but twice. That fact alone raises the stakes of any honest assessment, because an extension is not a formality. It is a grant of additional trust: more time, more authority, more room to act.

After years at the helm, what measurable transformation did DRDO get in return?

Not speeches. Not committees. Not another round of presentations. Transformation. Did decisions start moving faster? Did accountability get sharper? Did delays actually fall? Did the administrative layers shrink? Did scientists win back the freedom to do science instead of fighting paperwork? Did HR become transparent, litigation shrink, headquarters get leaner, the whole machine get more agile? Did the VijayRaghavan recommendations ever reach the laboratory floor — or did they die somewhere on the way? These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are the only questions that should decide a Chairman’s legacy.

THE REFORM THAT EXPOSED THE SYSTEM

The VijayRaghavan committee was not convened because DRDO was thought to be functioning well. It was convened because the structural rot had become impossible to explain away. Its recommendations touched organisational design, project management, HR, recruitment, industry participation, academic collaboration, accountability and the functioning of DRDO headquarters itself — a genuinely comprehensive blueprint.

And yet implementation stalled. By October 2024, reporting indicated that the major restructuring simply had not happened on the ground, despite round after round of meetings — with resistance from senior officials cited as a central reason for the paralysis.

That is the real story here. Not whether a committee wrote a good report. Whether the leadership had the spine to force it through. A report sitting in a file is not reform. A meeting is not reform. A slide deck is not reform. Reform begins the day entrenched interests lose their power to block it — and by that measure, DRDO under Kamat never got there.

THE HR MACHINE THAT EATS SCIENTISTS ALIVE
WHY ARE THE WEAKEST CHAIRMEN SELECTED TO LEAD DG HR?

If any single function deserves a merciless institutional audit, it is Human Resources. In a scientific organisation, HR is not administrative plumbing — it is the entire climate in which scientists either flourish or wither. Transfers, postings, promotions, disciplinary proceedings, service disputes, court cases: these are not side issues. They are the terrain on which scientific productivity is won or lost.

A scientist fighting a transfer order for 5Years is not perfecting a seeker. A scientist contesting a disciplinary file is not refining a radar array. A scientist litigating a promotion is not solving a propulsion problem. He is fighting the system that was supposed to be fighting for him.

The bureaucracy has stopped serving science. Science has started serving the bureaucracy.

That inversion is not an inconvenience — it is dangerous, and it happened on someone’s watch.

THE AFHQ QUESTION NOBODY WANTS TO ASK OUT LOUD

The role and growing footprint of administrative cadres tied to Armed Forces Headquarters inside DRDO deserves to be examined in the open — not through whispers and allegations, but through records. The question is simple: has the administrative machinery propping up DRDO grown disproportionately powerful compared to the scientific establishment it exists to serve?

If the answer is no, the numbers should prove it in five minutes. If the answer is yes, the government owes the country an explanation. How many personnel, against how many sanctioned posts? What functions do they actually perform, and where do those functions duplicate DRDO’s own establishment machinery? What does it cost annually? Who controls transfers, postings, discipline, litigation? How many of those decisions end up contested in court, and how many of those cases are still pending years later?

And the question underneath all of it: does this structure make DRDO faster, or does it make DRDO slower? These are not personal attacks on individuals. They are governance questions a serious country asks about a strategic institution — and a serious Chairman answers them, rather than leaving them to outlive his tenure.

WHEN ADMINISTRATION BECOMES POWER

Every large institution needs administration. But administration exists to serve institutional purpose — the moment it becomes indispensable for every routine decision, it starts accumulating power of its own, and that power has a way of becoming self-perpetuating. Files start outranking outcomes. Procedure starts outranking purpose. Hierarchy starts outranking expertise.

And slowly, scientists stop asking what does the country need next? and start asking whom do I need to approach to get this done? That is how institutions decay — not in a single dramatic collapse, but quietly: one unnecessary file, one avoidable dispute, one delayed posting, one dragged-out court case, one stalled procurement, one talented scientist who simply stops trying. Then another. Then another. Until the organisation still has its thousands of employees but has lost its momentum entirely.

Here weakest chairmen selected The weakest DG HR and DOP, But they are functioning with absolute power as a GOD for the DRDO  entire paternity.

THE COURT-CASE INDUSTRY

Litigation deserves its own uncompromising audit. When routine service matters routinely end up in court, the problem is rarely that employees are litigious by nature — it is usually that the administration itself is failing to resolve disputes before they escalate. Every significant case should be able to answer five questions: Why did the dispute start? Who made the original call? Could it have been settled internally? How much public money did it cost? How many scientific man-hours did it burn?

Because every court case involving a scientist carries a hidden bill — legal fees, administrative overhead, hearings, officers pulled off real work to draft responses — and somewhere in a laboratory, a scientist whose attention has been dragged away from the problem he was hired to solve. That cost never shows up on a balance sheet. National security pays it anyway.

THE SENSITIVE-DATA QUESTION THAT CANNOT BE WAVED AWAY

There are also unresolved questions surrounding the movement, custody and accessibility of sensitive DRDO information — questions that must be treated with total seriousness, not because every allegation is automatically true, but because national-security information cannot be governed by informal arrangements, assumptions, or institutional ambiguity.

If sensitive material moved outside authorised channels at any point, there must be a clean, documented answer: who authorised it, why, under what classification, who received it, where it was stored, who had access, what audit trail exists, and whether the transfer complied with security regulations. If the record is clean, it should be trivial to show that. A security investigation is not a weapon to be aimed at individuals — it is a mechanism that exists to protect the Republic, and it should be used as one. This was created by AFHq Cader, The Nation wants answer for it.

THE SCIENTISTS WERE NEVER THE PROBLEM

This distinction matters enormously, and it would be dishonest to blur it. DRDO’s scientists have delivered real strategic capability — in missiles, radar, aerospace, electronic warfare, naval systems, and more. The talent has never been in question. What is in question is whether the institution around that talent is capable of converting it into capability on time. That is an entirely different problem, and it is the one that actually needs fixing.

A country can have world-class scientists and a second-rate R&D management system at the same time. It can run brilliant laboratories out of a dysfunctional headquarters. It can post successful trials on top of chronically delayed programmes. It can spend enormous budgets and still deliver poor execution. Real DRDO reform, then, cannot be about stacking up more laboratories, more committees, more sanctioned posts. It has to be about building accountability for outcomes — the one thing that has been conspicuously missing.

THE CHAIRMAN’S TRUE TEST

A Chairman should be judged by what he leaves behind, not by what he presided over. If his successor inherits the same files, the same delays, the same bottlenecks, the same litigation, the same confusion, the same resistance to reform, and the same crushing dependency on layers of bureaucracy — then what, precisely, was transformed? That is the only test that matters. Leadership is not the ability to occupy the top floor of DRDO Bhawan. It is the ability to change what happens on the ground floor of a laboratory two thousand kilometres away.

THE MOST DANGEROUS WORD IN GOVERNMENT: “ONGOING”

Government has a peculiar vocabulary for standing still while appearing to move. Reform is always “under consideration.” Restructuring is perpetually “ongoing.” The file is eternally “under process.” The committee is forever “examining.” Years pass. People retire. Committees are reconstituted. Chairmen change. And somehow the reform itself never actually finishes — it simply remains, indefinitely, “ongoing.”

This is precisely why DRDO needs reform with teeth: not intentions, not promises, but deadlines, owners, metrics, and consequences. If a project slips, someone explains why. If a reform stalls, someone owns the stall. If a layer of administration is unnecessary, it gets cut — not studied again. If a scientist is worn down by an avoidable process, someone is held responsible. If sensitive information is mishandled, the investigation is uncompromising, full stop. That is how serious institutions actually behave. DRDO has not yet behaved that way.

WAS KAMAT THE WEAKEST CHAIRMAN?

History will settle that — but history needs evidence, not slogans. Calling any Chairman “the weakest” is a serious charge and should never be thrown around as one. It is equally dangerous, though, to shield senior leadership from scrutiny simply because the institution they run happens to be strategically vital. DRDO deserves scrutiny precisely because it is strategically vital — not despite it.

The Kamat years should be put through an independent, evidence-based performance audit: the organisation as it stood on the day he arrived, measured against the organisation as it stands today, on project delivery, cost escalation, HR reform, administrative efficiency, litigation, scientific manpower utilisation, technology transfer, industry participation, private-sector collaboration, procurement efficiency, security governance, and the actual implementation of the VijayRaghavan recommendations. Then let the numbers do the talking. If the record holds up, defend it. If it doesn’t, fix it. If it’s mixed, learn from it. But do not bury it in another file marked “ongoing.”

DRDO DOES NOT NEED A CUSTODIAN

It needs a reformer — someone who understands that scientific institutions cannot be run like conventional government offices, someone prepared to confront institutional inertia head-on and ask the uncomfortable questions instead of managing around them. Someone who will shield scientists from unnecessary administrative interference while demanding uncompromising scientific accountability in return. Someone who understands that autonomy without accountability curdles into complacency, and accountability without autonomy hardens into bureaucracy.

The next Chairman must be neither a bureaucrat who controls scientists nor a scientist who shields other scientists from being held to account. He must be an institution builder — because DRDO has had administrators. What it has not had, for far too long, is one.

The greatest danger to DRDO was never criticism. It is complacency. A country with ambitions of becoming a genuine global defence power cannot afford an R&D organisation that spends more energy managing itself than inventing the technologies of tomorrow. India needs hypersonics. It needs autonomous systems, advanced radar, electronic warfare, secure communications, propulsion, AI-enabled defence platforms, indigenous semiconductors, next-generation materials — technologies that do not exist yet, anywhere, and must be built here first.

None of that arrives at the speed the country needs while the institution charged with building it remains trapped in its own administrative inertia. So the real question was never simply “who was the weakest Chairman?” The real question, the one that outlasts any single tenure, is:

WHO WILL HAVE THE COURAGE TO FIX DRDO?

Because DRDO does not belong to a chairman. It does not belong to an administrative cadre, or a laboratory director, or any one scientist. DRDO belongs to India. And India’s strategic future is too important to be held hostage by institutional inertia — by anyone, for any length of time.

Hope MOD, PMO will take fast necessary action for the sake of National interest.

JAI HIND.