Echo Chamber

Ghazala Wahab

Once upon a time when the Indian economy held the promise of 10 per cent growth and no dream seemed too far-fetched, an Indian representative of a US-based defence company blamed the defence procurement procedure (DPP) policy for the inordinately slow pace of procurements. Worse, he pointed out, India was not even getting the commensurate ‘bang’ for the ‘buck’ it was spending.

In simple terms, despite paying through its teeth for weapon systems and platforms, not only was India getting mostly the previous generation of equipment (or those approved for exports, hence lacking the latest technologies), it was also not getting the knowledge or know-why to imbibe the learning from the equipment purchased. As a result, despite decades of license-production, no Indian company had the capability to design and develop a similar equipment/ platform.

According to him, there were three problems. One, nobody in the ministry of defence (MoD) had seriously considered issues specific to India. The DPP, when it was first framed in 1992, was a patchwork, picking on ideas from all over the world. These were super-imposed on Indian conditions, unmindful of our native peculiarities. Hence, what we had was a policy that met none of the Indian objectives; and satisfied neither the user (the defence services), nor the provider (the original equipment manufacturer). Worse, it did nothing to kickstart the indigenous defence industry.

Two, over the years, as the MoD repeatedly revised the DPP—in 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2016—it simply added layers to the existing policy, creating new categories for purchase of defence equipment without undertaking reforms that could have made the outright purchases contribute to the indigenous defence industry through genuine transfer and gradual absorption of technology. Ironically, the revisions to DPP merely created labels for the manner in which India had been buying equipment since Independence.

From off-the-shelf purchase (second-hand aircraft carrier and fighter aircraft from the UK, fighters, helicopters, guns, tanks and submarine from Russia, fighters and helicopters from France etc), to buying of design (Leander class frigates from the UK which became the primer for the Indian Navy’s earliest Nilgiri class of which six were built by Mazagon Docks Ltd), license production under technology transfer (Chetak-Cheetah helicopters, Milan anti-tank missiles, a range of ra