Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar will be visiting Washington next week where he will make a pitch for the armed drone because the Air Force needs a stealth cross border strike option. India is hoping its entry into the Missile Technology Control Regime
(MTCR) will give it access to coveted drone technology. The minister has his eyes on the Predator that the US deploys on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The drone in question has cutting-edge technology and US is not keen to pass it to India unless it signs two other treaties “ Communication Interoperability and Security Memorandum Agreement and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement. What happened to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s prestigious
‘make in India’ programme? India has a drone programme
which is run by the DRDO, that behemoth whose
best known product is a flushless toilet. It has been working
on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) christened as Rustom,
after Rustom Damania who headed
the programme, but it is years
away from developing an armed
version. Why is it taking so long for
the DRDO to develop the UAV when
the ISRO has already sent a space
vehicle to Mars? That’s because the
DRDO and the Defence Ministry are
like that only. As long as India keeps on buying weapons and
technology from abroad, the DRDO, armed forces and the defence
ministry will never feel the pressure to develop indigenous
technology.
What does the US do when it needs military hardware? Does
it go shopping in Europe? No. It builds practically everything
from scratch with the Pentagon playing a key role in research
and development. In 1960, Gary Powers was shot down while
piloting a U-2 spy plane. The Eisenhower administration
scrambled to replace manned spy planes with unmanned
ones. Money was given by the US Air Force to Ryan Aeronautical
Company which built the first reconnaissance drone. But
according to some reports, the Predator drone was the brainchild
of an Israeli engineer Abraham Karem who eventually
sold his company to a US buyer.
As is often said, necessity is the mother of all invention. The
air force needs a stealth cross-border strike option, but instead
working with the DRDO to fast forward the drone programme
it has chosen the easy way out of buying it off the shelf from
a foreign nation. This approach takes off the pressure on the
air force and the DRDO to advance technology and will undermine
the ‘make in India’ programme being pursued by the
prime minister. Desperation must be the corner stone of the
‘make in India’ programme. Anything less than that is bound
to fail.
