Our country has a vast coastline extending from Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal through the Indian Ocean. Also we have a long frontier with China and Pakistan to our east, north and west. As such we need a vast defence structure that has the capability of securing our borders and coastlines. Our defence preparedness becomes necessary in view of the fact that both China and Pakistan are not behaving as responsible good neighbours but as hostiles towards us. They do not miss any opportunity of creating obstructions in our progress. In reality it is our secular democracy that is a thorn in their side because neither of the two believes in either secularism or democracy.
As a big Asian country in the process of development, we need to take care of our interests whether it is the area of defence or security or foreign policy or trade and commerce etc. No country of our size, geographical location and demographic complexion can survive unless it becomes self reliant at least in its defence requirements. But when we talk of defence requirements we need to understand that modern defence structure is very complex, sophisticated and expensive. We are not talking about nuclear weaponry but essentially of conventional defence requirements. We will recall that soon after India became independent, we did not have the requisite infrastructure which could have enabled us to produce our major and minor defence requirements through our own factories. We had, therefore, to depend on weapon supplies from foreign countries. After India decided to be in the Eastern Block, most of our defence requirements were obtained from the erstwhile Soviet Union. Be it the equipment for our land, air or naval forces, most of the equipment and technology were imported from the Soviet Union. Even during the wars with Pakistan and China, we had to depend on Russian arms and supplies of spare parts.
However, after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was marked change in the foreign policy of the Russian Federation and we realised that we shall have to learn to pay more attention to indigenous production of our defence requirements. Fortunately our Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) prepared itself to meet the big challenge. First of all, attention was focused on raising the infrastructure that would be capable of conducting research in new technologies that would be useful for our defence system. The DRDO gradually developed into a giant organization and scientists and technocrats of highest calibre were inducted into service. At the same time this organization diversified its aims, objectives and achievements adding the component of collaboration with foreign defence production companies. With full support from the Government and policy planners, the DRDO has walked a good deal of distance to be able to produce indigenously a long list of military equipment and at the same time, pay full attention to new inventions.
Recently the DRDO has announced indigenous development of new equipment for all the three wings of our defence forces. Among these indigenously designed and developed technologies, non-lethal hand-held portable laser dazzlers would be of immense use for the armed forces in Jammu and Kashmir during the counter-insurgency operations and riots/mob controlling as these dazzlers produce randomly flickering green laser output sufficient to cause a temporary dazzling effect on a person or group of persons. Laser dazzlers will soon be handed over to the army on regular basis. Indigenous built Airborne Early Warning and Control India, is a compact state-of-the-art airborne surveillance system onboard an executive jet class of aircraft with the capability to detect and track, identify and classify targets in the surveillance volume and act as a command control centre to support air defence operations. The system integrates sensor data and presents the air situation picture for situational awareness to mission operators onboard and communicates with the ground command and control network via multiple ground exploitation stations. India Air Force will soon get the newly developed system. Indigenous researches have also reached the third component of our defence force namely the Navy. A milestone achieved by the DRDO is Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions by the Navy and agencies like the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited for safeguarding offshore installations. This vehicle is expected to be handed over to the Navy in the month of June when all tests are completed.
We would like to congratulate the DRDO and also the policy planners in the Defence Ministry for making these indigenous achievements. They have made the nation proud. The nation expects many big achievements from the DRDO in near future. We draw hopes from very capable and efficient technocrats that our technological institutes are throwing up. The day is not far off when our country will be fully self-sufficient in production of latest defence equipment of all varieties. Once we are relieved of dependence on foreign suppliers, we will be saving billions of dollars and divert the saved amount for economic development of the country.
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