By Jayant Singh
The troubled development of the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft has had dire consequences for Indian pilots.
Make in India – for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi this has become a maxim of state policy. Ever since he graduated to the prime minister’s office in 2014, Modi’s message to the world has been unchanged: Come, Make in India. From day one the government’s articulated policy has been clear: The way forward involves increasing manufacturing growth and raising it to global competitiveness standards. Make in India would not only revitalize India’s ailing manufacturing sector, it would also gainfully employ millions of young Indians that enter the workforce each year. Underneath the hype and the glib marketing campaign, Make in India offers enormous potential for India’s stuttering defense industry. The policy takes its cue from the high levels of imports that currently make up India’s military arsenal. A quick study of the Make in India website reveals that more than 60 percent of India’s defense requirements are met through imports. The precincts of limited resources within which the armed forces budget must operate makes the logic of Make in India even more compelling.
While Make in India may be the administration’s new poster child, defense indigenization is an old story. Achieving self-sufficiency in the defense sector has been an aspiration of the Indian defense establishment for many years. As early as 2004, the UPA Government set up the Kelkar Committee to recommend changes in acquisition procedures to enable greater participation of the private sector in defense production. The Kelkar Committee Report – “Towards Self-Reliance in Defence Preparedness” – was submitted in April 2005 and was the first to propose a direct offsets policy to bring technology and investments into the Indian defense sector. Although attempts to put in place structures and procedures for defense indigenization have been evident for well over a decade, the establishment’s long-cherished target of 70 percent self-reliance through in-house development has remained elusive. In the meanwhile, the downturn in foreign acquisitions and the absence of indigenous alternatives have affected armed forces preparedness.
The administration’s decision to encourage domestic industry, in line with its Make in India policy, is a major fillip for the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) program. Over the years, the Indian Airforce Force (IAF) has remained unconvinced about the LCA’s capabilities and has been reticent to guarantee orders for the Tejas fighter aircraft, as it is informally known. The renewed emphasis in the program has come by virtue of the new administration, which is unable to fiscally sanction large numbers of the Dassault Rafael aircraft and was thus forced to look into alternatives. Over the course of its development the LCA program has gone through many ups and downs, all well documented by the media. However, what has flown under the radar – and is now the remit of this article – has been the cost to human life by way of aircraft failures of other platforms that were pressed into service on account of delays to the LCA program.
Read the full story at The Diplomat