Homegrown PGMs

Prasun K. Sengupta

At the 14th Aero India expo held at the Yelahanka air force station in Bengaluru from February 13 to 17, several of the standoff precision-guided munitions (PGM) that had been undergoing development by the ministry of defence-owned Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) for close to a decade, were showcased in their ready-for-bulk-production configurations. Quite a few of them are to be bulk-produced by private-sector companies under three sub-categories of the ‘Make’ procedure of the MoD’s Defence Procurement Procedure’s (DPP) India designed, developed and made (IDDM) category. ‘Make-I’ refers to government-funded projects while ‘Make-II’ covers industry-funded programmes. Another sub-category under ‘Make’ is ‘Make-III’ that covers military hardware that may not be designed and developed indigenously, but can be manufactured in the country for import substitution, and Indian firms may manufacture such hardware in collaboration with foreign partners.

Gaurav gliding PGM & Rudram-1 NG-ARM

Anti-Airfield Weapon

The approval accorded by the MoD’s Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) on 28 September 2020 for commencing the process of bulk acquisition of the Smart Anti-Airfield Weapon (SAAW) worth Rs 970 crore, cleared the decks for private-sector industrial vendor selection to take-off, with the MoD-owned Bharat Dynamics Ltd already being nominated as the prime industrial contractor-cum-systems integrator. The private-sector entity expected to be selected is the Kalyani Group, which has a joint manufacturing industrial partnership with Israel’s RAFAEL Advanced Systems Ltd and is known as the Kalyani Rafael Advanced Systems Pvt. Ltd (KRAS).

Israel offered to co-develop a variant of this PGM with India on 7 July 2008 during an official meeting in Pune with the DRDO. This was followed by two additional meetings held in Delhi with senior DRDO and Indian Air Force (IAF) officials in August and September 2007. The joint R&D project (headed by the DRDO’s Hyderabad-based Research Centre Imarat) officially began in mid-2010. The gliding SAAW, to be launched from Nucon Aerospace-Alkan-developed quad-racks carried by Jaguar IS and Su-30MKI combat aircraft, has a length of 1.85 metres, weighs 125 kg and has a range of up to 100 km. The warhead section weighs 72.5 kg and comes with two options: penetration-cum-blast and blast-fragmentation, both with programmable impact-delay fuse. When equipped with an ima