Is the DRDO hurting the armed forces?

DEBATE

The corruption allegations apart, the issue in the Barak case is whether just the DRDO's objections are a valid reason for not buying foreign defence supplies.

AJAI SHUKLA,
Strategic Affairs consultant

The same DRDO that rejected the Barak is now entering into a JV with Israel Aircraft Industries to co-develop an extended range version of it!

What is shocking about the CBI's charge sheet against former Defence Minister George Fernandes for alleged kickbacks in the purchase of Israeli Barak missile defence systems for the navy is the gumption with which apologists of the Defence R&D Organisation (DRDO) "" contemptuously referred to as DODO in many international defence websites "" have jumped into the fray. A leaked letter, dated 1999, from then DRDO head APJ Abdul Kalam, recommends turning down the Barak proposal, and instead using the DRDO's home-grown Trishul missile.

But that was hardly an unbiased assessment. Kalam was overselling the Trishul, a project that he had personally overseen. Eventually, the Trishul was shelved in 2002 and will be formally buried this year. In choosing the Barak, the navy correctly perceived that even after 10 years of development, costing hundreds of crores, the Trishul was never going to make the transition from drawing board to battlefield. This month, the Air Force followed suit, announcing that it was buying the Israeli Spyder missile system to give its bases the protection that the Trishul was meant to provide.

This pattern of DRDO behaviour "" blocking a vitally needed purchase, offering to develop a substitute, and then failing to do so through years of delay "" gets repeated again and again and again. Its motives are not anti-national, merely self-serving: 30,000 DRDO employees, 51 laboratories and a budget of thousands of crores and rising has to be justified somehow. But as failures mount, and the stakes keep rising, vanity must be put aside. Today, the same DRDO that rejected the Barak, is entering a joint venture with Israel Aircraft Industries to co-develop for the navy an extended-range version of the Barak. For double standards, that's pretty hard to beat!

But on its own, the DRDO has an awfully dismal resume: the Arjun tank, being developed since 1974, has not yet met the basic conditions of the army. The Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), outdated before it enters service, will be an Indian shell containing almost entirely foreign systems. The long-awaited Akash missile, the Trishul's older sister, has not shot down a single target in conditions akin to a battlefield. Meanwhile, India's airspace remains largely unprotected. There seems little the DRDO can deliver "" night vision devices, radars, small arms, even bullet-proof jackets "" the military just does with what little it has.

Achievement may be in short supply, but what the DRDO does have in abundant measure is reach and clout. The President himself uses the rhetoric of indigenous capability to wish away its repeated failures. The problem is that there is more rhetoric than capability and, at least in the foreseeable future, far more promise than delivery.

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G BALACHANDRAN,
Visiting Fellow, IDSA

It is the DRDO's work that's ensured the US now recognises India can meaningfully cooperate in defence R&D and evaluation programmes

While there is no doubt the DRDO needs to reorganise to face the current challenges, its record has been substantial and there is growing international recognition of its capabilities. The MTCR (Missile Technology Control Regime) Annex Handbook emphasises technologies most critical to missile design and production and also lists countries that have the requisite technology to produce the items in question. Not all 33 members of MTCR produce all of the Annex items. However, three non-MTCR countries that figure prominently in many of the items described in the Annex handbook as having the requisite technology are China, India and Israel.

Developing Critical Technologies (DCT) reports, published by the US Department of Defence Militarily Critical Technologies List (MCTL) is a set of 19 reports focusing on worldwide technologies "" ranging from aeronautics to weapon effects technology "" that will become available in future and that will produce increasingly superior performance of military systems. A reading of these shows that India is estimated to have moderate to extensive R&D capabilities in a number of these areas. In fact, the Indian capabilities in various areas of military technologies, including those in the strategic areas, have led other countries, especially the US to focus on India's technology export control laws, rules and regulations! Almost all of this has been a result of the DRDO's work in the past two decades, when the first meaningful investments began to be made in defence research.

Since 2002, India has been amongst the few countries designated as friendly foreign countries by the US Department of Defense as being eligible to participate in cooperative project agreements under Section 27 (j)(1) of the US Arms Export Control Act "" this is based on the criteria that these countries possess the industrial or technological means to cooperate meaningfully with the US in defence research, development, test and/or evaluation programmes.

Although the DRDO has existed formally as an organisation for nearly 50 years, its real functioning began only in the 1980s. The DRDO's budget as proportion of the defence expenditure remained well below 2 per cent for much of the 1960s, till the early 1980s, and much of this was on salaries. It began to increase only from 1983 onwards. Nevertheless, it has had significant success in the fields of materials, missiles and electronics.

However, it must be understood that the effectiveness of military research efforts is closely tied to the general R&D and capabilities in the non-defence sector as well. Not only is the Indian national R&D expenditure low in comparison with other countries, its commitment to industrial R&D is also lower than the efforts of the industries in other countries to conduct R&D and advance their technical capabilities. Unless this improves, India cannot reap the full benefit of its investment in defence R&D.