Arms? stock: Let?s go Swadeshi...

With India strongly bidding for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council and desiring to be a world player, it is important that we must also analyse whether we have the necessary military wherewithal to be noticed and heard in the world arena. ?Might is right? is the language which is spoken there. To be a real military power as against a cosmetic one, we will have to change our concept of arming ourselves. It is time we start producing them at home.

With India strongly bidding for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council and desiring to be a world player, it is important that we must also analyse whether we have the necessary military wherewithal to be noticed and heard in the world arena. ‘Might is right’ is the language which is spoken there. To be a real military power as against a cosmetic one, we will have to change our concept of arming ourselves. It is time we start producing them at home.

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From 1997 till 2004, India spent $15.7 billion on arms purchase, accounting for 10.3 per cent of all arms purchased in the developing world during this period. In the last one-and-a-half years, by buying arms worth $11.7 billion, we have shot up to number one slot becoming the largest arms purchaser in the world. Point is by not building arms at home why are we enabling other countries to sustain their arms industry and economy at our cost?

It is not that India does not have the wherewithal and infrastructure to produce best of arms within the country.

With 39 ordnance factories, 42 well equipped research laboratories, eight giant PSUs totally dedicated to defence production, a Department of Defence Production to control them and a Rs 4,000-crore Defence, Research and Development Organization (DRDO) to assist them, we should be roaring military-industrial complex, but we feel happy just to export Rs 300-crore worth of arms as we did last year. It is a joke. Even Pakistan exports more than us.

There is no denying the fact that our political masters have been indifferent to India becoming a major arms producer and exporter as all other big nations in our league like China, Russia are. They feel much more comfortable in importing them. Our Armed Forces have also helped them in this field by placing all faith in Videshi and less in Swadeshi.

It is also not just a coincidence that every big arms purchase deal that the country has signed it has come with a scam tag. The money goes to the coffers of the party in power to cater for next election. In the 60s, India got hold of famous German aircraft designer Mr. Kurt Tank. He designed and produced in HAL a very good fighter aircraft named HF-24 (Marut) that was way ahead of its times and participated in the 1965, Indo-Pak War. The only problem the aircraft had was that it was underpowered. Instead of developing a more powerful engine for it and retaining the capability to develop more such aircraft the whole project was allowed to go to seed because some wise bureaucrat sitting in the MOD felt that country couldn’t afford this type of expenditure.

Now, we are spending millions of dollars in our LCA fighter aircraft (Tejas) starting from the scratch. This aircraft is already delayed by a decade. Only two technology demonstrators and two prototypes have been produced till date.

Hopefully it may join service by 2009.

In the 90s India bought two HDW submarines from Germany and balance of the two were built in India at Mazagaon docks. Just when we had become expert in building submarines in India, a very high tech task, the scandal broke loose that the company had given Rs 465-crore as bribe. Puritans that our political class is promptly all further production was stopped and investigation handed over to CBI. The CBI gave clean chit to HDW last year. By this time the entire production line had become moth eaten and the expertise got dissipated. We are now going for French Scorpene submarine production once again spending billions of dollars.

In 1974 we decided to produce within the country a state of art tank ‘Arjun’ for the Army. The tank saw the light of day only in 1997, almost two decades late with a weight of 58.5 tons and an engine that cannot sustain its weight. It is also having problems with its fire control system. Meanwhile, the Army had to go for crash purchase of T-90 tanks from Russia at the cost of 2000 crores. Now these tanks will be built in India after technology transfer. The Army has ordered 124 ‘Arjun’ tanks also, much against its wishes just to keep our indigenous effort going.

The sad commentaries of Defence production woes in India are endless. The only silver lining being the integrated Missile Development Programme under which the state of art missiles like Nag, Akash, Prithvi, Agni and supersonic cruise missile Brahmos have been developed. For this credit goes to the genius of Dr APJ Kalam who was then head of the DRDO.

In the final analysis if we want to be a major military power, we will have to pull up our socks and set our Defence production in order. We not only should produce state of art weapons for our Armed Forces but should also export them in a big way to meet our research and development expenses.

Nowadays arms production is a big industry, which we can only neglect at our cost. We must also implement the recommendations of Kelkar Committee in bringing in Private Sector also in the Arms Production field in a big way, beginning having already been made in 2001. They will be a big asset.