Just a few days ago, the defense ministry gave a initial approval to several acquisition proposals, including the one for seven lakh new assault rifles and more than 16000 light machine guns. The total cost is estimated Rs 15,935 crore. The decision was taken just a few days after the recent terror attack on the Sunjuwan Army camp in Jammu & Kashmir.
The decision was taken by the Defense Acquisition Council to float tenders to invite technical and commercial from armament companies. Nirmala Sitharam is the chairman of the defense acquisition council (DAC. In our country, the entire process, including field trials, can take a few years before the contracts are actually inked and the production begins.
Although the defense counsel has approved the “fast track procedure (FTP)” for the sixteen thousand light machine guns (LMGs) to be procured from the global market at a cost of around one thousand crores. This fast-track process has been approved to complete the total process within a year. But the process of weapons-buying in our country is frequently crippled by diffused structures with no single point accountability & responsibility, multiple decision-heads, duplication of processes, delayed execution process and no real-time monitoring and a normal tendency to fault-find rather than to facilitate the procurement process.
And as a result of this negligence the central government’s flagships “Make in India” initiative for the defense sector actually failed to demonstrate its true potential. The ‘Make in India’ was launched in 2014, but due to these constraints, it continues to languish at the altar of procedural delays.
Only 10% of the deals have been fructified in last few years. Total 144 deals were there in the last 3 financial years, but only 10-15 deals have been implemented. There are total 9 steps in the procurement process and each of the steps is time taking, as a result, it completes with enormous delay. From the stage of Request for quotation (RFQ), when the government formally reaches out to arms manufacturers to submit their sales offers, to the deal-closing clearance given by the Competent Authority, the delays are around 2.6 times to 15.4 times the deadline.
Actually, all the problems begin at the ground level which happens in the headquarters of the individual armed forces, when the demand for new procurement is first raised. As per the report, the lack of synergy between the three services- the Army, the Air Force and the Navy do not work as a system, which “puts greater stress and strain on the limited defense budget and hence the defense is unable to meet the critical capability requirements.
Around fifteen years ago, the Indian Air Force projected its requirement under the Medium Range Combat Aircraft (MRCA) deal for the jet fighters based on the single-engine. But later the scope of the requisition changed dramatically when the central government said that they wanted to include twin-engine jet fighters in the Air Force’s fighter-fly off. And as the twin-engine jets are much heavier and more capable, “MRCA” warped into the Medium Multirole Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) and the deal was ultimately scrapped altogether in 2016, after a long incredible 15-year process.
