Naravane: Defence modernization held hostage; flays ‘rigid’ process

Indian Army chief Gen M.M. Naravane on Thursday hit out at the bureaucratic procurement process holding defence modernization a “hostage” and called for “revolution in bureaucratic affairs” to realize the vision of “self-reliance”.

The Army chief pointed out that the new weapon acquisition policy Defence Acquisition Procedure

2020 which came into force around four months back has 681 pages against the earlier policy Defence Procurement Procedure

2016 which had just 450 pages. He said that the former defence minister

Manohar Parrikar had once remarked that our entire procurement process is based on distrust. “We are not being able to fast-track the process of acquisition. It is because we have tried to cater for every contingency and every loophole. This results in acquisition process getting tied up in knots. To that end what has happened is that the process and procedures, rather than the product, have become paramount and these are holding hostage the defence modernization,” he said.

“The laborious and time consuming and often rigid stages of this acquisition process also in themselves, create delays in the acquisition cycle. During this cycle better version of these equipment become available than is in the original contract. “But there is still no scope for negotiations to incorporate these new features and to make any midcourse corrections,” said Gen Naravane.

He said that any contemplated change takes this already delayed cycle back to the start point. “And then you have to start once again so this becomes a vicious cycle. We need to be able to fast track all these things. Since we have made the rules, we should also have the latitude to override them. Rules should be user friendly for the customer that is armed forces as well as the manufacturer. This waiver clause must be there to cater to operational condition and to accommodate different specifications then were originally promulgated,” he said.

Army chief said that once skis to be used in snowbound terrain were rejected because vendor offered ultra-light skis weighing 1.6 kilos against formulated qualitative requirements of 2 and 5 kilos. Similarly, punji which are sharp pointed spikes used as obstacles, were rejected because it was of 6 kilos against notified requirement between 3 and 5 kilos.