Short on Firepower

Aditya Kakkar

The ministry of defence (MoD) issued tenders for eight types of ammunition in March 2017 with details of the project shared with potential vendors.

Ammunition by Nexter Munitions – ©Nexter

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has been rightfully scathing in its critique of the MoD’s inability to procure and store functioning ammunition for the Indian defence forces. The CAG’s second report on ammunition shortages came out this year on July 21 while the first one came in the year 2015.

The CAG report says that while War Wastage Reserve (WWR) stocks of some of the critical items have improved such as explosives and demolition items, the ammunition for Armoured Fighting Vehicles (AFV) and Artillery ammunition “meant for sustaining superior fire-power were under critical level”. The previous government had come up with a plan called the ‘Ammunition Road Map’ to rapidly add to ammunition stocks by 2015. The report, however, observes that “despite a lapse of more than three years, from March 2013, no significant improvement in availability of WWR ammunition was noticed”.

The stock of 61 types of ammunition, out of a total of 152 types of critical ammunition, is available for 10 days. Only the stocks of 20 per cent of the armoury, 31 types of ammunition, were found to be satisfactory. The Indian military is required to hold enough ammunition to fight a short intense war of 20 days while earlier, it was required to have store supplies, spares and ammunition to fight a 40-day intense war. In 1999 the WWR was scaled down to 20 days, given the changes in modern warfare.

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The availability of high-calibre ammunitions for tanks and artillery meant to sustain fire-power in a