Sunday, March 27, 2005

My first blog.....

And I am starting with an article on the development of indigenous defence systems by various nodal agencies in the country.
Recently,the media is talking about the delay in the defence projects done under DRDO(Defence Research and Development Organization) and the amount of resources consumed by them. We read about the delay in the first test flight of the LCA(Light Combat Aircraft), Failure of Arjun tank, Akash anti-aircraft missile project being scraped and many other failures. People are raising questions about quality of research done at this place. Even the military personnels are now speaking about the same. And this way, the educated people(especially students with science and technology background) in India don't have respect for these development agencies as compared to what they have in mind about NASA like research agencies. This kind of projection is leading lot of young intelligent people to just go out and work for other country giving rise to a vicious cycle which makes India eventually loose the brain power which it has produced. The mass of intelligent people who can solve many problems and innovate new technologies goes out of the country leaving very few to work on the problems cropping up here. As we try to compete with the world class development organizations and develop state of the art systems, we face those problems which requires people to solve the problems. This will increase the delay in development giving rise to more failures which media would immediately report. We need to stop this cycle or we will never become independent in our technological needs.
So are we really far far below the international standard in R&D works. Let me quote some of the examples which will a slightest doubt about our capability to develop world class products. We all know that the Nuclear Tests conducted in 1998 was a big surprise to USA having all the spy satellites and other spy network target to keep an eye on nuclear activities of India. USA was very sure that India can't perform these kind of tests. Were they doing a mistake? definitely no. They had strong reasons to believe this. A particular component, a High Speed Switch, is necessary to for the test which at that time only USA could build and we didn't have the technology to build them and was near impossible to develop in the time frame given. But the scientists at DRDO research lab at chandigagh were able to developed them and this development was kept highly secrete as otherwise it would signal our intentions. Another example is about the insas riffles built with indian technology which is much better than AK-56 or AK-47 still costing less than these rifles. Indian army is using insas in almost all infantries. To list other examples,we have BrahMos Supersonic cruise missile jointly developed by India and Russia, interest from Russia and China to collaborate in development of MCA(Medium Combat Aircraft),modified version of LCA,Prithvi missile development and deployment in all three wings of the armed forces. And above all this, we should remember that this development is done with very less funding from government in comparison to the funding available to developed countries. These is a huge difference and that is the biggest obstacle for us. What is the way out?..we need to continue doing development under low budget untill other countries start buying defence systems from us. When this will start, India will start reaping the advantages of all the development done so far. And we can move from a developing country to a developed country.
So the bottom line is to keep doing good work for our own country,increasing awareness and respect about these organization among youth and one day we will reach our goal.