This country is not unused to huge delays in many things to do with the government. Still, the latest performance audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) on the air force and navy must come as a shock, because the delays in procuring defence equipment are serious enough to compromise India’s defence security. In the past, various ministers have tended to label CAG reports on their areas of responsibility as incomplete and incompetent but, in this case, Defence Minister AK Antony has been honest enough to admit that the CAG’s observations are mostly on the ball. So how about some corrective action?
A summary of the observations is quite chilling — there is a 53 per cent shortage in the number of medium power radars that are required for ground control, and this goes up to as high as 76 per cent when it comes to low-level transportable radars. The root problem is huge delays in the procurement of new radars. None of the air force’s plans for new radars prepared after 1971 (or nearly four decades!) have been approved, so there is ad hoc procurement and deployment; and a very large proportion of even these radars are ready for phasing out. The air force is managing the only way it can under the circumstances — it has cut back on the number of hours that it surveys various locations. Meanwhile, the project to link stand-alone radars so as to detect low-flying aircraft (of the kind that dropped bombs in Purulia) and placing them under one Control and Reporting Centre has not happened nearly two decades after it was conceived. Ditto for the Integrated Air Command and Control System which was approved in 1999, while the shortage of trained pilots varies has varied from 15 per cent to 31 per cent.
As for the navy, the report points to huge slippages in induction plans, so that more than half the submarine fleet has completed more than 75 per cent of its operational life. When the first new submarine is inducted in 2012, 63 per cent of the existing fleet will have completed its prescribed life. As a result of the shortage and the need for refitting, the average operational availability of submarines, the CAG says, is as low as 48 per cent. In which case, the big defence scandal is not pay-offs like Bofors, but the gaping holes in the country’s security cover.