'Defence ministry to extend full support to IDSA'

The defence ministry will extend full support to the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) think tank to strengthen its research work, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said on Friday.

Addressing the 49th annual general meeting of the Institute, which functions as an autonomous body despite being affiliated to the deffence ministry, he assured the members that required funding would be available to IDSA to enable it to provide independent inputs to the government and help in decision making, adding that IDSA's various seminars and research papers have been useful to the government.

Parrikar, who was elected last year as the IDSA president in his capacity as the defence minister, also said that IDSA could possibly have an institutional arrangement with the proposed Indian National Defence University (INDU), which will be set up in Haryana in the near future. The draft paperwork for the latter was nearly through, he disclosed.

The newly appointed director general, Ambassador Jayant Prasad, briefed the members about the Institute's activities in the past and the projects in hand.

As a society, IDSA is governed by an Executive Council (EC) drawn from various fields. Its members can continue for two years each, and the members of the newly constituted EC are:

President: Manohar Parrikar

Members: Charan D Wadhwa, Vice Admiral Anup Singh (retd), G.K. Pillai, Gulshan Rai Luthra, Ambassador Swashpawan Singh, Air Marshal M. Matheswaran (retd), and Lt. Gen. Prakash Menon (retd).

Staff Representative: Meena Singh Roy

The defence secretary and foreign secretary are ex-officio members of the EC. Funding for the Institute is provided by the defence ministry, although project-based assistance is sometimes given by the external affairs ministry.