Armed Forces’ needs must be realistic: AK Gupta, Defence Production Secretary

NEW DELHI: The defence ministry believes the armed services need to be more "realistic" in shaping their qualitative requirements for military hardware if they want to support the ‘Make in India’ initiative.

Speaking at a seminar in Delhi, Defence Production Secretary AK Gupta said that "ambitious qualitative requirements" were inhibiting private sector participation in many defence projects.

"We are getting too ambitious, the Service Qualitative Requirements (SQR) are not in consultation with the industry, and they need to be realistic and attainable," Gupta said.

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Gupta made the comments while responding to a question on the delay in procurement of bulletproof jackets during an interaction on Monday at the Indian Institute of Defence Studies & Analyses.

The defence production secretary said there is a case for formal discussions on SQRs among stakeholders before they are firmed up. Responding to Gupta’s remarks, sources in the armed forces said the current process does take into account views of relevant stakeholders and is quite exhaustive.

"SQRs are vetted by not less than 26 agencies, including Defence Research & Development Organisation. It takes six months to approve a SQR and it is not the Army’s decision alone. The delay (in bulletproof jackets) has been on account of DRDO not having testing facilities to evaluate the prototype as per the SQR."

DRDO has recently procured a testing facility and the defence ministry has ordered the agency to produce bulletproof jackets on the same SQR. Gupta said the defence ministry was doing its best to push the ‘Make in India’ initiative. "Indigenous defence content in all three services, which has been hovering at around 40% over the past few years, is planned to be pushed to 70% by 2027."

He listed several initiatives, including the decision to liberalise the foreign direct investment regime. Also, he added, validity of industrial licences has been increased from three years to 15 years with a provision to further extend it on a case-to-case basis.

"So far, 50 companies covering 79 industrial licences have commenced production. Further, 34 joint ventures have been approved for manufacture of various defence equipment."