Road Under Construction

Ghazala Wahab

Despite several revisions and expert committees’ recommendations for over two decades, the ‘Make in India’ road to indigenisation in defence continues to be under construction. Worse, the doubts, recriminations and insecurities remain where they were at the commencement of the journey, which eponymously began in 2015 when Prime Minister Modi coined the slogan, but was actually in practice from the time India bought its first defence platform, nearly 50 years ago and Indian entities started license-production.

The private sector maintains that assurances of equal participation notwithstanding, the government continues to protect defence public sector undertakings (DPSUs), basically its own, by nominating programmes to them, instead of challenging them through open competition with the private sector. At a recently held seminar, appropriately titled Nation-building Through Shipbuilding, president Shipyards Association of India and chairman Tebma Shipyards Ltd, Vijay Kumar lamented, “Sure, the government must support the DPSUs, but are we not Indians?”

Speaking of the Indian shipyards, he pointed out that the private shipyards, all 20 of them, have the total government orders worth Rs 8,000 crore between them, whereas the nine DPSU yards have the combined order worth Rs 1,95,000 crore.

“There is a huge anomaly here,” he said to the audience comprising fellow industry people and naval officers, both serving and retired. The government of India was represented by a couple of middle level bureaucrats. They were there to read out the official position; not listen to the concerns of the industry.

“This anomaly is the reason that there is a huge backlog with the DPSU yards and they are unable to meet the deadlines. Given the pace at which technology is evolving, what good are ships that are delivered well past their deadlines?”

Earlier in the same seminar, chief of naval staff Admiral Karambir Singh had mentioned in his keynote address that 51 naval ships are currently on order, of which 49 are in the Indian yards. In the same semi