The Hindu : `Indigenous manufacture of key naval equipment must'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jan 07, 2004

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`Indigenous manufacture of key naval equipment must'

By Arunkumar Bhatt

MUMBAI Jan. 6. The Navy wants the indigenous industry to graduate to manufacturing critical equipment for weapons such as fire control systems, missiles and radars and a host of equipment used in propulsion, with foreign collaboration, if necessary, to begin with.

"The industry could make spares of lots of equipment of foreign-origin used by warships. We are having regular talks with the Confederation of Indian Industry," the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Madhavendra Singh, said here today. The CII had been provided with details of equipment installed on recently-commissioned stealth frigates of the Talwar class so that interested firms could consider producing them.

The Naval Chief was talking to the media after delivering the keynote address at a seminar on logistics organised by INS Hamla, the premier logistics and material management training institution of the Navy, to mark its golden jubilee.

He agreed that the Navy would have to streamline its procurement procedures to encourage industry to enter the field of naval stores and equipment. He asked logisticians not to harp too much on the concept of leaner inventories. "Remember, we are not a commercial organisation but a fighting service and we need a certain level of war reserves for we could be called upon to deliver at a short notice."

But he advocated the concept of "total asset visibility", in which all the inventories held by different units were visible and available to others — no matter who held it — if their requirement was more urgent and pressing. It discouraged internal hoarding or secret stores for own requirements in future. Computerisation and networking would enable the needy ship to know where to find the nut it needed.

He said that Indian warships called at 94 ports around the world in their recent voyages and the naval logisticians supplied them wherever they were and whatever they needed. The Sail Training Ship Tarangini now on circumnavigation had lost all its sails in a storm but it got an entirely new set of sails at the next port.

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