DRDO’s Arjun Tank scores bull’s eye on Indian Army egos

DRDO’s Arjun Tank scores bull’s eye on Indian Army egos

Somewhere down the harsh heat of Thar deserts, one of the Defence Research and Development Organisations (DRDO) prestigious projects, the Arjun Tank, ably performs one of the stringiest of testing with Indian Army’s 43rd armour. The DRDO representatives invite as many Indian Army Armor officers to test drive it in between the tests.

South Block, New Delhi, the nation’s capital, top DRDO officials give a high pitch, power packed presentations to the defence officials.

The one year old, Directorate of Public interface, the PR arm of the DRDO shuttles journalist to Combat Vehicle Research and Development Establishment (CVRDE), the birth place of Arjun Tank, for a test drive.

There is new found aggressiveness in DRDO. DRDO wakes up the fact that a fabulous product does not sells itself, it needs PR too.

Arjun Tank is one of the strange case seen in the product development history. CVRDE takes up the project after it was initiated by Indian Army. Subsequently a host of Army deputes, including the former Army Chief Shankar Roychowdhury, worked on the project. Every year the Vice Chief of Army Staff monitors the project. Then when it comes to inducting it, the Army drags its feet. Throughout the development of the project, anonymous army officials feed the press of the failure of Arjun Tank. When the Tank is ready, the Army officials use frivolous reasons to delay the induction. Since its one year of inception, Frontier India Defence and Strategic News Service has documented not less than 3 such attempts to delay the induction of the Arjun Tank. It included announcement and withdrawal of comparative trials, then delaying induction on grounds that it should be totally sealed for medium fording and finally misleading the parliament of imaginary defects during the Army’s (AUCRT) internal trials. In fact, just before the AUCRT, Frontier India had written about the “color that Army would give to lend to the trials.” True to the warning, Indian Army lived it up.

Since the projects inception, the DRDO and CVRDE have bent backwards to please and accommodate the army, which is the end user. On its part, the Army has moved goalposts, openly blamed DRDO for failing to make Arjun Tank, humiliated its scientists via careful leaks, delayed trials and delayed induction. Even the current Army Chief openly called it as a “sub standard” tank is a conference for armor. Indian Army officers dominate the countries think tanks, the Industry-defence interface CII-Defence is led by an ex officer who was key to inducting the controversial T-90 tanks from Russia, the retired officers wrote in national papers and ex officers who have joined the foreign arms dealers. Till 1990, the army had good time as there were no good defence ministers or national media which had knowledge of defence research matters. Frontier India too has an experience in which an ex army officer wrote to us and asked us to stop the “salesman ship” of the Arjun Tank. The exchange of the emails can be made available to any official investigation committee.

Arrival of the Indian Premier PV Narasimha Rao who is responsible for all good things that India enjoys today, saw inducting the tank into the Armoured Corps. Subsequently, a host of informed defence ministers started arriving on the scene. Since then the Army has been on back foot. The time also saw some sections of the media getting wiser and started asking hard questions. In fact, the failure reports of key national defence projects reached such high decibels that it attracted attention. The arms trials have no more a hush hush affair.

Faced with adversity and improved atmosphere, the DRDO slowly but surely cranked up its PR machinery. It follows many strategies but, let us concentrate on the major four strategies they adopted.

First strategy was to invite as many users to try the product. The second strategy was increased access to media on successful trials and willingness to convey the nature of failure when occurs and share the remedies. The Akash Missile trials with the Indian Air Force (IAF) was so well publicized that it put the detractors in IAF on back foot. The third was to ramp up the DRDO presence in the trade shows and displays to the general masses of India via DRDO permenant exhibition center. What it still lacks is the engagement of Indian think tanks. For example DRDO has a sponsored chair in Indian Peace and Conflict Studies which could be used to correct the perspectives. The fourth strategy they adopted was to differentiate themselves from the OFB and HAL, which is responsible for final production of the equipment. So, the R&D was attributed to the DRDO and production defects were attributed to the production house.

All this had a quantum effect on the Arjun Tank project. Interestingly, it seems to have separated the wheat from the chaff. It has isolated the positions of the Director General Mechanised Forces (DGMF) and Director General Military Operations (DGMO) with respect to indigenization of equipment as a whole. The 43rd Armour which tests the tank, the armoured corps officers who have driven the tank have appreciated it. The current Defence Minister AK Antony, Minister of State for Defence M.M.Pallam Raju, and Minister of State for Defence Production Rao Inderjit Singh, have understood the importance of indigenisation. One of the commendable stances taken by the ministers is to make DGMF responsible for induction of the Arjun Tank, there putting it under pressure to perform.

Many questions like corruption in defence purchases, incompetence of the political appointed officers have come up. It cannot be ascertained for sure, but, some of the officers suffer from RAJ syndrome. The mighty army ego’s versus the civilian led organisation likeDRDO is very evident. By the current trend DRDO looks to have outsmarted them. The Arjun Tank fiasco by the Indian Army has started denting their Army ego’s atleast.

Google's Super Satellite Captures First Image

This bird's-eye view of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania was the first image ever seen by the GeoEye-1, the world's highest-resolution commercial satellite sponsored by Google, when it opened its camera door earlier this week.

The 4,300-pound satellite collected the image at noon EDT on October 7 while moving from the north pole to the south pole in a 423-mile-high orbit at 17,000 miles per hour, or 4.5 miles per second. The spacecraft can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 centimeters -- close enough to zoom in on the home plate of a baseball diamond, according to Mark Brender, GeoEye's vice president of communications and marketing.

Even though the GeoEye-1 satellite sports a colorful Google sticker, its key customer is actually not Google but rather the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a U.S. government agency that analyzes imagery in support of national security. The NGA is paying for half of the development of the $502 million satellite and has committed to purchasing imagery from it. Google is GeoEye's second major partner.

"This is the opposite of a spy satellite," Brender said in a phone interview. "Spies don't put info on the internet and sell imagery. We're an Earth-imaging satellite, and we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground."

Since around the late 70s, the military has used high-resolution spy satellites capable of reading newspaper headlines in Red Square. But only in recent years the technology became available to the public and businesses while concurrently making dramatic strides in coverage and resolution. For example, when Google Earth launched in 2004, its imagery was low-res and spotty. But by March 2006, a third of the world population could get a bird's-eye view of their own homes in high resolution.

There's one catch for Google: While the GeoEye-1 will provide imagery to the NGA at the maximum resolution of 43 centimeters, Google will only receive images at a 50-centimeter resolution because of a government restriction, Brender explained. However, Google's partnership with GeoEye is exclusive, meaning the search-engine giant will be the only online mapping site using the satellite's photos.

"We're commercializing a technology that was once only in the hands of the governments," Brender said in a phone interview. "Just like the internet, just like GPS, just like telecom -- all invented by the government. And now we are on the front end of the spear that is commercializing this technology."

Considered the world's most-accurate commercial imaging satellite, the GeoEye-1 had been undergoing calibration and inspection since it was launched on September 6 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

A second satellite, GeoEye-2, slated to launch in 2011 or 2012, will have a resolution of 25cm, company representatives promised. However, Google's satellite imagery will not likely get more detailed because of the 50cm regulation.