BANGALORE: The Indian Army’s 43rd Armoured Regiment will be known as the Arjun Regiment, following the handing over of 16 Arjun MBTs (Main Battle Tank) at the Heavy Vehicle Factory, Avadi, adding 45 Tanks for the Army. The regiment of 45 tanks will be subjected to a conversion training and field practice for a period of three months.
Then, the Army is planning to conduct a comparative trial with T 90 tanks in October/November 2009 to assess the operational deployment role of the tanks.
The present batch of 124 tanks will be delivered by March 2010.
Due to the long gap between the R&D phase and the production phase from 1993 to 2000, problems related to re-establishing production lines, vendor sources and resolving overseas issues like technology-denial in view of the Pokhran testings, change over and mergers of OEMS for the critical items delayed initial commencement of production.
In August 2009, the first pilot batch of production tanks were handed over to the Army, during subsequent production, the Army insisted upon the demonstration of medium fording capabilities of the tank.
Subsequently, the production tanks were incorporated with all medium fording modification and the next batch of nine tanks were handed over by September 2007.