fanne wrote:Thums up!!
for the problem statement. How do we solve that?
Agree to the tour de force post.
How do we solve that?
First break down what he really said in the long post.
MoD system: babus, services are reluctant to give quantity orders to sustain indigenous defence production.
Various impediments are put in from development stage:
1)AQSRs based on combing the best of the brochures with out nary a thought of what Indian needs are really,
2) moving goalposts,
3) very low trickle funding, and then
4) innumerable trials and
5) incorrect trials and
6) when production time comes haggle like crazy for very small production runs.
7) Write disparaging articles on Indian made products
8 ) even when they belong to a different service!!!
The whole system is to kill domestic development and manufacture of the defence products.
Why is that?
In vivek's post one big factor is not mentioned.
The underlying circumstances or environment.
After death of Gandhi, Indian business did not fund Congress like it used to do before.
So Nehru found defence imports are good to pad and skim for party funding. This allowed him funds off the scrutiny (defence is sacred cow) Didn't matter they were weapons that were hardly useful for the land based threat and were craypy planes from the British. And also big ticket items so that the cut is bigger. Eg. aircraft over spares, tanks over rifles, aircraft carrier over frigates and destroyers. You get the idea.
This required a special type of cadre both civilian and military who will push for imports. Various techniques were developed and perfected to sustain the imported weapons drive. And these are listed above in the 8 factors named. There could be more subtle ones via QA to scrap whole lot and show production is bad.
Then Rajiv Gandhi hit upon anew twist to this plot. he diverted the funds to his personal Swiss bank account.
This collapsed his government once it was revealed in 1988.
Now enter the babucracy nexus of : babus, arms peddlers, procurement directorate officials (civil and military). This coterie also known as Chandigarh brigade ruled roost for ~ 30 years till 2018. They were unchallenged kings of what they saw and even threatened sitting generals as we saw. They identify procurement directorate folks while they are at Major rank level
Now this coterie suddenly faced Manohar Parrikar who figured this simple scam and brought in measures to check them.
So some lesson by observing MP.
You need to reform the procurement process
means eliminate propensity to import
If you increase the defence budget it will go to imports.
Cut out middle men.
and so on.
Very glad we have ACM Bahduria who is committed to Tejas system.
Navy is already there.
Lost in the CDs decision was that Army had accepted Arjun Mk1A pending Mk2.
And CDS will clean up logistic and repair hubs which are another source of scams.
lets see.
