'Increase Pvt industry investment in aerospace, aeronautics'

"The investment private industries are making at present is sub-critical and has be accelerated and increased. If you want India to become a real (force) aeronautical sector, private industry must participate in a big way which requires investments," Saraswat, who is also the DRDO Director General, told mediapersons here.

The investment could be through Public-Private Partnership in various projects and programmes taken up by DRDO, space departments and public sector undertakings like Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, he said.

"Unless we work together and augment our manufacturing capabilities, we will always not be able to make the required numbers at the right time", he said.

"Private industries will invest for augmenting production and we (Public Sector Undertakings) will invest for development," Saraswat said.

To a query, he said investing in the aerospace and aeronautics sector would be an attractive proposition for the private industry because of market availability. The question was how to cash in on the market, for which a strategy has to be evolved to make sure it is captured properly, Saraswat said.

He said private participation in the sector has not taken off because most aerospace and aeronautical products go into military and not civil aviation systems.

"The problem is that the civil industry is not taking the army and military requirements as their own. We are still importing Airbus and Boeing.... We are not making our own civil aircraft. Had it been a purely a civil aviation requirement, this would have come up by now," Saraswat said.

He urged private industry to graduate from being small volume producers to large-volume state-of-the art technology producers. "This will require investments, developing technology and setting up R&D base,"he said.