Indefensible Defence - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 229

find your overall strengths, buy in what you need with a well-developed supply chain and
assemble your platforms,' he says.
The DRDO has a hefty budget - Rs 10,610 crore for 2013-14 - and 52 laboratories. It
employs some 5,000 scientists and about 25,000 support staff who are involved in projects
ranging from combat vehicles and armaments to submarines and aircraft. But instead of
being a centre of excellence, it has frequently failed in both technical and financial terms
to meet the needs of the military, which then buys abroad. According to a report by the
ministry's Controller General of Defence Accounts (CGDA) in 2012, only 29 per cent per
cent of the products it developed in the previous 17 years were being used by the armed
forces. 37 That is mainly because of DRDO failings, but it is also the result of the defence
forces enjoying buying abroad and consequently resisting, or at least not welcoming, some
DRDO developments. 38
The CAG report noted that, in several cases, the DRDO bought equipment after spending
large amounts of money on its own unsuccessful research and development, or offered
equipment that was more expensive than was available on the open market. It spent Rs 6.85
crore developing explosive detectors, which it offered to the army for Rs 30 lakh each at
a time when foreign versions were available for Rs 9.8 lakh each, including the cost of re-
pairs and maintenance. 39
The main DRDO successes have been surface-to-surface missiles called Agni and
Prithvi, but it has failed to produce smaller missiles for the army and navy, which bought
instead from Israel. The army resisted buying its Akash surface-to-air missile for a decade
but now recognizes that it is a success. After 30 years of work, the DRDO's Aeronautical
Development Agency (ADA) has also failed (initially hampered by US sanctions that
blocked component deliveries) to produce an acceptable version of a light combat aircraft
called the Tejas to replace Russian MiG 21s. 40 HAL, which should be focusing on devel-
oping the technological and manufacturing capability to produce aircraft of Indian design,
prefers to focus instead on building foreign fighters and other aircraft under licence where
it has had a monopoly for decades. Russia's Sukhoi-30MKI, 'which was initially bought
fully-built from Russia for Rs 30 crore per fighter, is now made by HAL (substantially from
Russian systems and subsystems) for well over 10 times that figure,' Shukla wrote in a re-
port in December 2012 that went unchallenged. 41 'Building expensively suits HAL well;
since its profits are a percentage of production costs, higher costs mean higher profit.'
The development of the army's Arjun battle tank is a story of almost 40 years of delays,
performance controversies, specification changes, increasing use of foreign components,
and indecision about how many tanks to order or whether to abandon it. 42 The DRDO began
work in 1974 and continued for 35 years till the tank entered service with an armoured
regiment in 2009, during which time popular Russian tanks were used. Foreign compon-