The Rafale saga has thrown up new twists in its meandering and tortuous journey since January 2012 when it was selected as the successful bidder for the IAF’s MMRCA “mother of all deals”. The announcement of the prime minister in Paris that India would procure 36 Rafales via a government-to-government route has been the latest turn and has thrown open the question of the relevance of the “Make in India” drive. It is good that the government has shown political guts to break the logjam and give the IAF “minimum oxygen”, as defence minister Manohar Parrikar put it; however, it raises a few niggles regarding the path that would be taken to follow up on the defence indigenisation drive, of which “Make in India” is just a subset.
“We want peace from a position of strength and not from one of weakness,” the defence minister had said at a seminar in Delhi last month. The seminar, meant to throw up ideas for increasing India’s embarrassingly minuscule defence exports, ended up no different from the multitude of previous such events. There was a litany of oft-heard grievances and how nothing has changed; illustrative of the anguish in the private industry was the statement of a CEO that “everything is still licensed, except the licence.” And, as usual, the government was absent, barring two officials, who too left before the Q&A section. To be fair, the defence minister announced that a revised Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) would be promulgated soon. Unfortunately, the DPP is only part of the problem as the malaise affecting manufacturing of true indigenous defence products lies elsewhere.
“The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind, is to get an old one out,” military historian Liddell Hart had said. In the Indian context, it extends to the babudom, which controls military manufacturing policy. Nobody wants to let go of the power that comes with archaic rules that stifle local private industry and land up benefitting foreign manufacturers. If PM Modi’s “Make in India” is to succeed, defence manufacturing should be the prime target for the government, as that is where the low-hanging fruit lies.
A misperception that afflicts us all is the fallacy that only big-ticket items, the likes of MMRCA and T-90 tanks, constitute defence manufacturing. An analysis will show that there are enough low-value (relatively) but high-volume items that can kick-start the “Make in India” effort; in fact, there may be many for which we have paid for the Transfer of Technology (ToT) but have forgotten about them, a la the 155mm Bofors artillery gun saga! Let realism govern our thinking, for, if the secretary, department of industrial policy and promotion says (as he did at the seminar) that of their total production HAL exports only 2 per cent, Bharat Electronics 3.5 per cent and ordnance factories only 0.19 per cent, while we import 70 per cent of our armament requirement, shouldn’t we be thinking of first becoming a defence manufacturer?
The answer to the problem lies in the comment of the second government official present at the seminar who rued that rules do not permit export licences! But who makes rules, if not the government? If any progress is to be made, just two basic administrative decisions are necessary—all else will follow. Firstly, ownership of defence indigenisation should be fixed, and secondly, the Defence Offsets Management Wing (DOMW) should be drastically reformed.
“Ownership” of the indigenisation process rests in a body that makes indigenisation policy and analyses whether it is being implemented. This entity, thus, becomes accountable; that’s where the ownership of the process should lie. Presently, is it the department of defence production or DG (acquisition) or is it the MoD as a whole? Can these behemoths be penalised when the rapid turnover of office-bearers is governed by promotion policies of sequential appointments—“aaya ram, gaya ram” to use a political jargon? The fact that severe censure from innumerable Parliamentary Committees on Defence has not derailed any bureaucrat’s career is proof that no one has ownership. Thus, one marks one’s year or two in the MoD, pushes files and moves on—indigenisation stays where it is, and so does the nation.
What happens elsewhere? In the US, there is a Defence Acquisition University that was born from the ills of what their defence historian William Gregory described as the acquisition system being one that had been “managed and over-reformed into impotence with volumes of oversight regulations”. He observed that their Congress had been pursuing an impossible dream by trying to legislate perfection when “no regulation could create good management or top-notch people”. The result was the setting up of a permanent Defence Acquisition Corps that ensures continuity “from cradle to grave” of a project. In UK, their MoD has an integral civil services permanent cadre that follows through to ensure continuity. So, what should India do? As a start, create an empowered body and post quasi-decision takers (joint secretary-level officers) of ALL ministries concerned (taxation, excise, industrial production et al) under one roof and under one boss. Call him/her DG Defence Indigenisation or whatever, but ownership has to rest there—it would be his/her success or failure. They should have a fixed tenure of four-five years (not less) and it should be clear to them that indigenisation results would determine further career progression. As a parallel, the government should fast-track defence acquisition training at the soon-to-be set-up National Defence University to produce acquisition professionals.
It will be at least a decade, despite all the honest efforts of this government, before any semblance of a defence manufacturing base is visible on ground. Till then, India will continue to import heavily and herein comes the second recommendation. It is vital that the DOMW squeezes technology worth every cent of the USD 100 billion-130 billion of defence offsets that are expected to flow, and for which we have paid dearly. But, one has to be an eternal optimist to believe that just the 10 personnel (also with limited tenures), who presently constitute DOMW, can deliver! If we do not radically reform DOMW now and make it, first potent and then accountable, the seminars will continue to be what they are now—just good “time pass, with a sumptuous meal thrown in”.