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 imaging infra-red (IIR) seeker, the miss distance is less than 0.1 metres, while the figure in GPS-guidance mode is less than 7 metres.

The SAAW’s airframe contains a smart tail-unit (STU) containing a fibre-optic gyro-based inertial navigation system (FOG-INS), plus a receiver for NavIC, the operational name of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite (IRNSS). NavIC provides both Standard Position Service (SPS) and Restricted Service (RS). SPS is for normal civilian use and gives positional accuracies of 10 metres over the Indian landmass and 20 metres over the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). On the other hand, RS is the encrypted-level for military applications. The accuracy of RS level is between 0.5 metres and 5 metres. NavIC uses dual frequency bands, L5 (1.17GHz) and S band (2.5 GHz). The SPS signal is modulated by a 1 MHz BPSK signal. RS uses BOC 5,2 (a square sub-carrier modulation, or split-spectrum modulation).

Nucon Aerospace-Alkan Quad-Rack for SAAW

Anti-Radiation Missiles

The DRDO commenced R&D work on anti-radiation missiles (ARM) back in 2012, when financial approval for Rs 317.2 crore was accorded in December 2012, with project completion being targeted for 2017. The detailed feasibility study phase lasted