Indian Army looking to replace foreign-origin weapon systems

Army Chief General Manoj Pande has said Indian forces would be fully able to fight wars with indigenous weapon systems in a decade’s time.

Pushing forward the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Make in India' and 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' missions, India Army is trying to reduce its dependency on imported weapons. Sharing the sentiments, Army Chief General Manoj Pande admitted that the Army is looking to replace foreign-origin weapon systems.

Essentially, the Indian Army is using foreign made medium-range air defence missiles and man-portable solutions; however, Gen Pande aims to replace them with India-made products to reduce dependency to great extent. Talking to the media professionals at the Aero India Show going on in Bangalore, he reiterated that the Army needs to work on finding a replacement for these.

Gen Pande is of the view that whether it's shoulder-fired MANPAS or short-range or medium-range surface to air systems they should be replaced with the ones that are designed, developed in India. He is quite optimistic when he says that a number of firms have come up that will find a good replacement that could meet Army's specific needs.

India is already working on indigenously-developed Light Combat Helicopters which are extremely suitable for Army's requirement for a helicopter that could operate in high-altitude. General Pande also claimed that Indian forces will be fully able to fight wars with indigenous weapon systems in a decade's time.

Emergency procurements worth Rs 15K-cr

Indian Army has an approved budget for emergency procurement and according to Gen Pande it would be spending nearly Rs 15,000 crore on around 80-odd projects that have been identified for immediate purchase and they are all built in India. Earlier, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh made it clear that the "trust" factor between the govt and local defence industry became stronger than ever.

Speaking at Aero India Show, the minister reiterated that India is focused on indigenization programs and for that, the policy initiatives are already there. For instance, the share of procurement of arms from the local vendors has been increased to 75%, this used to be 68% before. When translated into numbers, this increase goes up to Rs 1-lakh-crore worth of defence deals.

Rs 5.94L-cr for defence

India has seen tremendous growth in defence expenditure under the Modi government and the trend has continued even in the budgetary allocation. This year's budget has allocated a total of Rs 5.94 lakh-crore for the defence sector. The government has been working tirelessly for the modernization and infrastructure development in the sector.