Four Defence Ministry funded projects and five industry-funded projects under the “Aatmanirbharta” initiative of the Prime Minister approved by the Narendra Modi government.
Russian forces still a long way off in capturing their objective. This month Ukraine and China hiking their defence spending by 7.1% and the Indian foreign policy options remain constrained by its limited capacity to manufacture hardware from precision-guided ammunition to long endurance armed drones.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi strongly pushes for building India’s military-industrial complex. Before that the Indian military reliance on outright hardware acquisition or transfer of technology under licence from Russia has severely limited the country’s strategic options. India’s belief and its strategies are not same due to New Delhi’s faith in rather laggard Indian defence public sector units and its in-built suspicion towards the private sector.
The result is that a PSU assembled Su-30 MKI fighters in India are more costly than the one made in parent country Russia. Because of that India is forced to buy a Russian T-90 tank radiator costing 1 crore from the original equipment manufacturer even though the Indian private sector companies are said to produce the same at 1/5th the cost.
The problems will be compounded as the Russian equipment particularly the fighters are high maintenance with a long turnaround time as compared to the Indian Air Force (IAF) with French fighters. The Chinese will also face the same music as the PLA Air Force uses Russian engines and so does the Pakistan air force now in its Chinese or Russian origin craft fleets.
PM Modi’s AB initiative is much required and much appreciated. The building of a military-industrial complex requires time and is spread over decades of sustained development of military technologies and their translation into state of the art equipment that time.
If India decides to build a nuclear attack submarine then the program will take at least a decade even if the private sector is involved as no country will allow its high tech companies. It remains same in the case with fighter engines and armoured vehicles. India has not been able to develop a fighter engine with LCA relying on American GE-404 or GE 414 engines yet.
“Aatmanirbharta” is not only the key to push India to the high table but it is also the lever to exercising truly independent foreign policy options. Strategic autonomy is not another name of Nehruvian non-alignment.