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Agni Failure Bad News For India
India's doomed Agni missile.
by Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Washington DC (UPI) Jul 17, 2006
The failure of two major India missile launches in two days Sunday and Monday proved intensely embarrassing for the nation's prestige and threw major doubt on its military-industrial high-tech capabilities.
An analysis from the Inter-Press Service that was published in the Asia Times Tuesday argued that the problems are deep-rooted in the Indian defense establishment.
On Monday, a $50 million geosynchronous satellite launch vehicle, or GSLV, with a communications satellite on board was ordered to self-destruct as it veered off course soon after liftoff on Monday. Authorities at the civilian Indian Space Research Organization said one of its four strap-on rocket motors had failed.
The day before, the Agni III intercontinental ballistic missile, the pride of India's strategic missile forces, failed shortly after take off. The Agni III was designed to have a range of 2,100 miles to 2,400 miles -- a capability that would have allowed it to deliver a nuclear weapon payload as far as the Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai. But on its first, and much delayed test launch, it crashed instead into the Bay of Bengal after flying less than 600 miles.
Of the two unsuccessful launches, "the failure of the Agni III was in some ways more serious because it exposed the political limitations of India's attempts, despite its ambitions, to pursue a military capability which is truly independent of the U.S.'s strategic calculations," analyst Praful Bidwai wrote in the Asia Times.
The Agni-III was originally meant to be tested in 2003-04. However, its first test was repeatedly postponed owing to technological problems. More recently, as we have noted previously in these columns, the Congress Party-led government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh deferred a scheduled test launch this year so as not to risk hostile reactions in the United States while the U.S. Congress was considering ratification of India's nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States.
However, committees of both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives have given overwhelming approval to the nuclear agreement that was finalized in March and its passage through both main chambers of the U.S. legislature now appears assured. Also, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured Indian officials in New Delhi in June that testing the Agni III would not be viewed as a concern by the Bush administration.
Previously, some tests of the shorter range Agni-II with a range of around 1,200 miles also proved unsuccessful, Bidwai noted. "But what makes the Agni-III's failure significant is that unlike its shorter-range predecessors, it was a wholly new design, developed with the specific purpose of delivering a nuclear warhead," he wrote.
"The causes of the failure of the test flight are not clear," Pridwai wrote. "Scientists at the DRDO (India's super-secret and prestigious Defense Research Development Organization) which designed and built the missile, have been quoted as saying that many new technologies were tried in the Agni-III, including rocket motors, "fault-tolerant" avionics and launch control and guidance systems. Some of these could have failed. Other reports attribute the mishap to problems with the propellant."
"The DRDO isn't the world's most reliable weapons R&D agency," Admiral L. Ramdas, a former chief of staff of the Indian Navy, told Inter Press Service. "The Indian armed services' experience with DRDO-made armaments has not been a happy one. Their reliability is often extremely poor. We often used to joke that one had to pray they would somehow work in the battlefield."
Despite an annual budget of $670 million, comparable to that of India's massive Department of Atomic Energy, "The DRDO has delivered very little,"
Anil Chowdhary of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace told Bidwai.
"None of the three major projects assigned to the DRDO has been completed on time or without huge cost-overruns," Bidwai noted. The organization's project to build India's first home-produced main battle tank began more than 30 years ago in 1974. Yet the tank has still failed to meet service requirement tests and is reportedly too heavy and undependable to be used in combat operations, he wrote.
The equally venerable DRDO project to build India's first home-manufactured nuclear submarine is still not completed, despite expenditures on it of nearly $1 billion, Bidwai wrote. And a Light Combat Aircraft, or LCA project, launched in 1983, is also mired because the DRDO has failed to develop the right engine for it, he wrote.
Even if the DRDO can manage a successful test launch of the Agni III ICBM in the next few months, Bidwai's analysis suggests that the structural problems of India's military-industrial sector are widespread and deep-rooted and unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved soon. That condition is likely to give an added impetus to India's efforts to develop ever-closer high tech ties with the United States.
Source: United Press International
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Agni Failure Bad News For India
Agni failure exposes DRDOs flaws
ISROs failed GSLV launch is forgivable compared to the Agni-III debacle, which is just one in a line of many a failed DRDO project. It is time to promote accountability, writes Praful Bidwai
Praful Bidwai
It is no more than a mere coincidence that two delivery vehicle launches by India of the intermediate-range Agni-III ballistic missile, and the Indian Space Research Organisations (ISRO) Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) carrying the Insat-4c communications satellite should have failed on two consecutive days. But it would be wrong to put the two in the same category or infer a causal link between them.
Put bluntly, ISROs failure was, relatively speaking, an honourable one not unexpected in the high-risk satellite-launch business. The Agni-III crash, by contrast, highlights serious, structural problems within the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), and its chronic inability to overcome them.
Six of ISROs 21 scheduled rocket launches since 1979 have been unsuccessful. This 29 percent failure rate certainly does not match the performance of the European Ariane rocket programme, with its five percent failure rate. (Russian and American launch failure rates are under half the Indian level.) But ISRO has shown an upward learning curve and a rising competence level. Its likely to bounce back although it may not rise to First World standards.
However, DRDO remains plagued by incompetence, inefficiency and a hyper-bureaucratic, extremely secretive culture. It has shown few signs of willingness or ability to learn from its past mistakes. This is true not just of its missile programmes, but all its major weapons systems.
White Elephant? An Agni II missile being displayed on Army Day in
New Delhi
AP Photo
DRDO typically succeeds only while adapting or copying an already existing design, not developing a new one
DRDO typically succeeds to a limited extent only while adapting or copying an already existing technology or design, not developing a new one. Its first missile-development programme was launched in the 1970s, but had to be abandoned. Project Valiant, an ambitious attempt to develop a 1,500 km-range ballistic missile, was a total failure. But Project Devil partially succeeded in reverse-engineering the Soviet sa-2 surface-to-air missile. This spawned the rather primitive liquid-fuel Prithvi missile with a 150-250 km-range after the government launched the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) to develop a family of strategic and tactical missiles in 1983.
The Prithvi was first tested as early as 1988. It has since undergone numerous test-flights and has been in serial production. But it is hazardous to handle because of its corrosive propellant. And the armed forces are reluctant to buy/use it.
The Agni programme, launched in 1983, essentially borrowed the slv-3 rocket from ISRO and put a Prithvi on top of it. After just three test-flights, the government declared that the Agni was only a technology-demonstrator, not a missile slated for production. There were no Agni test-flights between 1994 and 1999. Then suddenly, between April 1999 and August 2004, DRDO conducted three successful developmental flight-tests of a new missile, the Agni-II, all-solid-fuelled and with a range of 2,000-2,500 km.
Strangely, Agni-II came before Agni-I, which was test-flown in January 2002 and has undergone three tests.
Usually, the big powers put a missile through 12 to 20 tests before declaring them developed or ready for serial production. But Agni-II and -I were so declared after just three tests each without a serious evaluation of their accuracy and reliability.
Reliability is all-important in missiles, especially those carrying nuclear warheads. You dont want mass-destruction weapons falling off on populated areas by accident. Thats why missiles are tested under varying, trying conditions. DRDO is cavalier about such matters.
Agni-III is supposed to give India an effective nuclear deterrent against China because it can reach deep into the mainland and hit Beijing and Shanghai. The missile has been under development since early 1999. Its design is all-new. Its first test-flight was originally scheduled for late 2003, but was postponed to 2004 and then again till last Sunday.
ISRO has shown an upward learning curve and a rising competence level, and is likely to bounce back
The generally accepted reason for the delays is political: Indias fear that a test-flight would annoy the United States at the time of the Congressional ratification of the nuclear deal. But theres no denying that DRDO takes a long, long time to develop an all-new design, not a mix-and-match one. The causes of the crash are not yet known. They may well lie in basic design, besides malfunction of guidance systems or the propellant.
Whatever the causes, the failure is a major setback to the IGMDP. It means a direct loss of Rs 200 crore, the missiles cost, which is probably of the same order as the GSLV-F02s, plus the costs of development, redesign, additional personnel etc.
No major DRDO project has been an unqualified success. None has ever been completed on time or without huge cost overruns. Consider the three biggest projects: developing a Main Battle Tank (MBT), a nuclear-powered submarine, and an advanced Light Combat Aircraft (LCA). The MBT project was launched in 1974. But the tank has failed to meet service-requirement tests. It is reportedly too heavy and undependable to be used in combat. The Indian Army prefers Russian tanks and says it will use MBTs for training, not operations. The nuclear submarine project, launched 31 years ago, is not yet finished despite an estimated Rs 3,000 crore spent on it. The reactor is apparently ready, but not tested with the vessels hull. The LCA project, launched in 1983, is still in the doldrums: the DRDO has failed to develop the right engine. Even with an imported engine, the plane is unlikely to enter service anytime soon.
The primary reason for these shocking instances of underperformance and ineptitude is lack of public accountability and DRDOs oversight. The more we coddle it, and lionise people like APJ Abdul Kalam, the less will we promote accountability. However, there is a bright side to the Agni-IIIs failure. The flight-test was cleared by the US chiefs of staff chairman Peter Pace a clear case of Washington recruiting India as a countervailing force to China. Agni-IIIs success would have almost certainly precipitated a Sino-India arms race, centred on missiles. Such an arms race would be detrimental for India not just because it would affect the current process of reconciliation with China, but because it would seriously destabilise regional security. The Agni-IIIs failure is a good time to explore peace with China through non-military, non-missile means.
source
Tehelka - The People's Paper
As i already proof Surya=dead project!
ur Wording blasst effects more thn 800 Surya 1 and Surya 2 and Sura 5 (daddy jaan) Surya 6 (ami jaan) Surya 7 (Pardada) Surya 8 (7 Janam kay baad jeta missle) 
