PAC blasts govt for Scorpene delay, cost overruns

NEW DELHI: The parliamentary Public Accounts Committee ( PAC) has blasted the government for giving ''lame excuses'' for the inordinate delay in finalizing the programme to construct six Scorpene submarines at Mazagon Docks, which has now been compounded by the project being hit by huge time and cost overruns.

Navy will now get the first of the six Scorpene submarines, being built with French company DCNS/Armaris as the main collaborator, only in August 2015, instead of the earlier planned induction in 2012. Moreover, the total project cost has now escalated to Rs 23,562 crore, as reported by TOI earlier.

India, incidentally, is now down to just 14 ageing diesel-electric submarines, with only two-thirds of them operational at any given time. Of them, only four HDW submarines will be left by 2015.

In its report tabled in Parliament on Thursday, the PAC ''outrightly'' rejected the defence ministry's reply that the procurement's highly complex nature and extensive scrutiny of the proposal were responsible for the delay in finalizing the contract.

''MoD's reply, far from tenable, is not acceptable. MoD should discard its tendency of putting lame excuses. It should take corrective action to ensure contracts are finalized within a specific timeframe and defence procurements are made according to plan to avoid time and cost overruns,'' it said.

Deploring MoD's ''unwarranted stubbornness'', the committee asked the government to quantify the exact loss in terms of money as well as to ''recover the losses and fix responsibility'' to ensure such incidents are not repeated.
Even as India's underwater combat arm is fast depleting, both China and Pakistan are rapidly bolstering their submarine fleets with new inductions.

India, on its part, needs to ensure the Scorpene submarine project is not hit by any more slippages.