Indigenous Spares For Bofors Gun Developed

Even as the CBI is trying to nail the alleged recipients of payoffs in the controversial Bofors gun deal, the defence ministry has succeeded in indigenously developing spares for the 155 mm howitzer guns procured through the deal.

The spares have been developed through acquisition of technology transfer document from the Swedish company, Maj Gen A K Agarwal, director-general of quality assurance (DGQA), ministry of defence, said.

These have been developed as part of the Union governments efforts to indigenise defence equipment and attain self-reliance in view of the high cost of acquisition of equipment and their maintenance, Maj Gen Agarwal, who was here in connection with a defence exhibition-cum-workshop yesterday, said.

 

The defence ministry made available the technology documents to produce the spares, while in the case of those where the documents were not available, it displayed the spares themselves for local manufacturers to make a bid to supply them, he said.

The efforts of the department of defence production and supplies to indigenise equipment manufacturing have also resulted in locally making spares for the BMP infantry combat vehicle, he said.

Maj Gen Agarwal said the collapse of the Soviet Union and other eastern bloc countries had made it imperative for India to review its policy of depending on foreign sources for the defence requirements and to exploit the potential of the indigenous industry.

Though indigenous industry had been taking part in the effort to manufacture defence goods locally, it had been restricted to relatively simple and non-sophisticated items, he said.

But the present requirement was to support the sophisticated defence imports and to acquire spares indigenously, he said.

Keeping in tune with the changes that have taken place in the industrial sector, the DGQA had also streamlined its procedures for quality assurance and assessment of vendors for defence, he said and added the department had recently approved a liberalised scheme for self-certification under which the supplier would be responsbile to certify the quality of equipment supplied.

On the other hand, the department of defence production and supplies was also having periodical interaction with industrial representatives in order to minimise the problems in executing defence indigenisation orders.

Maj Gen Agarwal said the DGQA had taken a special interest to involve small the SSI sector in the indigenisation effort.

Currently, the SSI share was 25 per cent in terms of value of the spares produced and in order to give a further thrust, a time-bound action plan had been drawn up by the department of defence production in association with the small scale industries development committee, he said. As part of this plan, three-day workshops-cum-exhibitions were being organised at nine different industrial centres in the country, he said.

So far 900 SSI firms had been assessed by DGQA and 355 units had been registered out of it, he said. On complaints from the SSI units that only very small orders were being placed, he said it was due to the fact that the defence ministry was only seeking spares.

India plans to indigenise defence production from the current 30 per cent to 70 per cent by the year 2005. Last year, defence supplies worth Rs 200 crore were procured locally.