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The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) was set up in 1958 with a vision to "provide our defence services a decisive edge by equipping them with internationally competitive systems and solutions". The DRDO has clearly failed in its mission. There seems to be inherent problems with the functioning of these organizations, their performance of delivery has been dismal, their failures many, the cost escalations prodigious, their obsessive indulgence in irrelevant and peripheral activities and their several technological misadventures which directly impacted India's defence preparedness & strategic positioning.
It has been over five decades since its inception that DRDO and its agencies have been clambering to provide viable defence equipment as an alternative to overseas procurement, the defence forces addiction to foreign purchase is not out of habit but was forced to resort to off-the-shelf panic buying whenever they realised that the strategic balance was tilting in favour of their adversaries.
Extremely unhappy about the current state of affairs, Prime Minister Modi had put DRDO on notice in August 2014. The PM had asked the tardy organisations to shape-up in the face of competition from the private sector. The Prime Minister had asked the defence minister to conduct a detailed review of the organisation, and if need be come out with a white paper on it.
Modi personally delivered a stern message to DRDO, asking the officers to give up their "chalta hai" (lackadaisical) attitude. This is the first time the nation's PM had directly reprimanded DRDO.
The Ministry of Defence should enforce ruthless accountability, centralized reporting structure as in the case of ISRO and create effective management competence within DRDO to ensure fruitful collaboration with the private sector defence industry.
THE PAKISTANI MODEL
Pakistan, our main adversary has had tremendous success with its missile program. It coordinated a shrewd & pragmatic approach with China the other bad guy in our firmament to achieve its goals 'by methods, fair or foul', while our path was to develop indigenously all complex weapon platforms. Pakistan's aim was to leapfrog as well as piggyback technologically, as reinventing the wheel was not necessarily an answer to the yawning technological gap that existed between India. Their initial attempts to develop ballistic missiles were comical disasters, the HATF-1 series developed by Pakistan space agency SUPARCO not only proved to be unreliable but woefully inaccurate. The program was abandoned after many trial fiascoes as Pakistan did not have the industrial or the technological base to pursue such a sophisticated program. They quickly realized that wasting time on complex weapons development will only elevate their vulnerability. Therefore, they purchased ballistic missiles of various class to counter India's progress in this field. Their determination to procure capabilities far beyond their reach was a canny operation, China & North Korea were ready to violate the Missile Technology Control Regime to provide Pakistan with long-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Pakistanis are masters in convoluted psychological games, they exploited China's hostile disposition against India to their own advantage. They have followed the adage "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" to the dot.
It is another thing that the Pakistanis has been mouthing off the much maligned "indigenous" word, the world is well aware that their defence equipment are outright purchases from abroad and re-badged with Pakistani nomenclature.
Here is a list of missile systems procured from abroad and claimed to be "indigenous":
The Argument
As an illustration, Kalibr is a Russian surface ship and Submarine-launched Anti-Ship and Land Attack Cruise Missile developed by the Novator Design Bureau. The Kalibr has a coincidental resemblance to DRDO's lumbering Nirbhay program, mainly due to the physics of a cruise missile's aerodynamics conformation, hence this author contends that India should have clandestinely purchased these missiles from Russia (who would have willingly supplied the same) painted it in shades of gray and presented to the world as the indigenous Nirbhay. A patently easy job to achieve. Coming to the question of why India did not undertake such a course is entirely due to its purist mindset and obduracy and in addition was the pomposity to achieve the inconceivable.
THE CHINESE MODEL
The Chinese followed a different model altogether, they have thrived on plagiarism and reverse engineering, mainly on equipment originating from Russia, but off late they showed fearless daring to to scoop design blueprints from the Americans notably the hacking of F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter schematics.
Why are the Chinese so dedicated to copying and employing newfangled methods to get information on almost anything from western and other sources? It is presumably a cultural thing. Historically, Chinese folklore propounds that copying is a way of showing respect for human mastery over Science, Technology and the Arts. As an illustration, the Chinese painter and critic Hsieh Ho from the 5th Century AD formulated the "Six Principles of Painting", which included a tenet "to convey and change by patterned representation", which translates subtly "to transmit by copying".
The Chinese have scant regard to infringement of International intellectual property rights or innovating on other people’s creativity. Bootlegging technology in every sphere of scientific development is a well-honed Chinese practice, and it is diligently backed up by massive government funding and logistics support.
The Argument
India should have adopted the same method to develop its defence requirements, the list of possibilities are myriad such as whole aircraft, drones, missiles & rockets, turbofan engines, radars, armored fighting vehicles, infantry arms, naval assets or even spacecrafts, but India did not explore this potential solution.
CONCLUSION
It is next to impossible to conceive the ideal model for adoption as far as India is concerned, but they have proved to be effective in the Chinese and Pakistani context. Pakistan has an arsenal of missile to address its strategic needs, how they got them is not the question but how it is deployed as a deterrence factor is of paramount importance. China is posing grave threats to not only its neighbors but also to the sole superpower in the world the U.S. by means of its offensive weapons capabilities. Pakistan has been bellicose over India due to this singular fact and its trigger happy generals have ensured them this status. As per the view of this author, our policy makers have followed a fallacious system of weapons developed which has neither consolidated or enhanced the infrastructural constitution of our armed forces.
