Sunday, April 7, 2019
Decoding Indian Defence Production
Technology and manufacturing have always grown with growing defence expenditure. Ironically India’s defence demand instead of building its capabilities has been draining its resources continually since independence. In fact, it has been compliant to let its political processes to be controlled by the supplier nation states or non-state actors (aka Multinational Corporations aka military industrial complexes).
India, like many nations that are prime defence markets seem to be hard wired not to learn from past experiences. A demonstrative case would be the evolution of aircraft manufacturing. HAL had developed a supersonic frame for an indigenous aircraft, Marut. This program was abandoned to pursue a new aircraft called Mirage from a fledgling French aviation company called Dassault that was reviving post WW2!
It is almost dejavu to know that the Marut, which was designed to be supersonic suffered from lack of engines that could help take them past sound barrier. While the problem that led to desertion of large program was known, there were no systemic national programs that followed to address this gap. Incidentally, the next indigenous aircraft program from HAL after many decades, Tejas, also suffered time overruns and near death experience for want of engines! Guess decades in between was not sufficient to built competencies in developing good engines.
It is things like this that expose our deficiency in leaderships to plan and direct programs as a nation. For an ecosystem that revels in nepotism across spectrum, recognising and rewarding excellence is systemic deficiency. In fact, the eco system to sustain mediocrity thrives in compliance and penalizes entrepreneurial adventures. It is a tad difficult to have leaders who can think long and fight the ecosystem to build large integrated programs.
Whilst there could be plenty of examples for failures, the space and nuclear programs thrived irrespective of many well placed interventions. Leaders par excellence in both political and scientific arena pushed the envelopes and opened multiple doors. These cases provides opportunities for developing leadership as a skill. People with this skill need to be identified, nurtured and deployed appropriately.
In Shri Narendra Modi Government, there was a significant effort made to revive the entrepreneurship spirit of the nation. Variety of schemes were announced to pursue this goal. However like programs before them, they didn’t have bench strength across Government and industry to follow up on the vision to be translated to effective success stories on the ground.
To be fair, there were significant efforts made to push the ecosystem beyond their comfort zone to bring about change. Some of these exercises in the short-term would appear to hurt the monopoly and market of defence PSU. Incidentally, some of the defence PSUs had finally breached their own imaginary iron curtains and reached out to expertise within the nation to help their product development and improve efficiencies. Hopefully these organizations continually work to sustain these initiatives to build ecosystems that support them in the long-term!
It is important for us to repeat the story of Advanced Towed Artillery Gun System (ATAGS) many times over without it being lost in the din. ATAGS is a 155mm howitzer gun that was designed and developed by the DRDO. This technology was transferred to 2 private sector manufacturers in the automotive space and the OFB. The private sector companies went on to manufacture the guns and broke records during their field trials. They are now ready to be inducted into Army, which has been starved for big guns and was having it in their desperate shopping list for a while.
Allowing DRDO, a research and development agency, to access the market with more than one manufacturer has been very rewarding in accelerating product development, testing and deployment. Success stories like these encourage large manufacturers to take the leap of faith. Significant developments in technology and the forward movement of the ecosystem is bound to follow.
While large manufacturers are essential to bring large capital and sustain the industry, they are effective only as long as they have an effective supplier base. Tier 1 and 2 suppliers turn out to be great innovators owing to various pressures. Building this base in a wider corridor and clusters can be helpful for them to built competencies and look for markets beyond defence production.
An example of this horizontal deployment is the jewelry industry in Surat that went on to use their 3D laser machining skill to make cardiovascular stents. The titanium machining centres nurtured for spacecrafts and missile manufacturing diversified to manufacture orthopaedic implants. Therefore, Governments vision of defence corridors has merit based on experience. However lack of mission and deployment plans is a cause of concern.
It is essential to appreciate the current Government to have pursued this paradigm shift, impact of which will take significantly longer period of time to be realized on ground. This is similar to what Shri Narasimha Rao did to the economy. Incidentally, he didn’t get back on the saddle after his first term to pursue the initiative vigorously. Some may say, the initiative had slowed down after his term owing to the uncertainty in political environment.
In the current context, one could only hope that the elections don’t push the nation into a political limbo. Along with the wishes for clear mandate let us hope the inertial resistance to change course in Government, irrespective of who is on the saddle, continues for the long-term good!
