Aditya Kakkar

The ambitious ‘Make in India’ umbrella policy that attempted to include manufacturing in several sectors including defence has slowly unraveled in face of poor economic and governance foundations. Countries are hesitant to transfer core technologies and India’s poor enforcement of law is evident in daily battles of land acquisition along with poor infrastructure that has led to an inefficient supply chain of necessary inputs. The ‘Make in India’ policy of the defence sector has seemingly ended even before it began. Since the present government was voted to office, a number of projects have been announced but not a single one has come to fruition.

The most recent of the projects to face the axe has been the Rs 32,640 crore programme for 12 new mine counter-measure vessels that were to be built at Goa Shipyard Limited in collaboration with a Busan-based yard, Kangnam Corporation, and was pegged as one of the costliest ‘Make in India’ initiatives. Minesweepers are deployed to secure harbours by locating and destroying mines. The Indian Navy has been struggling to scale up its mine-warfare capability. Its current mine counter-measure force consists of six vessels bought from the erstwhile Soviet Union in the late Seventies while the navy presumably requires at least 24 minesweepers to secure major harbours in the country. The situation is likely to worsen as the existing minesweeper fleet is to be decommissioned between 2018 and 2020.

The Opposition party has also commented on the many cancelled projects. “The government must answer as to who benefits by scrapping a series of defence deals and important projects.” It has also alleged that the armed forces’ demand for defence cap