Indian Army being forced to use ammunition it doesn’t want

After scraping through in a battle over the standard-issue weapon, with the government finally accepting that the locally manufactured INSAS rifle may be ineffective and allowing for better weapons to be ordered, the battle for better ammunition is something that the Army has been fighting all along, writes Senior Journalist Sanjib Kr Baruah.

Hyderabad: In a shocking revelation that impacts Indian’s military operational readiness, it has now emerged that the Army has been equipping itself with the ammunition it doesn’t want and had marked as ‘obsolete’ in 2009.

After scraping through in a battle over the standard-issue weapon, with the government finally accepting that the locally manufactured INSAS rifle may be ineffective and allowing for better weapons to be ordered, the battle for better ammunition is something that the Army has been fighting all along.

The ammunition in question are 30mm, 40mm, 51mm, 81mm, 84mm, 105mm, 120mm, 125mm, 130mm and anti-personnel mines. These are ammunition that fired from infantry combat vehicles, anti-aircraft guns, mortars, rocket launchers, field guns and T-72 and T-90 tanks, an audit report on Indian ordnance factories tabled by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in Parliament on Friday has pointed out.

At the heart of the matter is the ‘fuze’ used for ammunition. A very critical part of any effective ammunition without which the ammunition is useless and redundant, ‘fuze’ includes a casing containing explosive material in a small quantity, which kick-starts the explosion by detonating the explosive filling inside the shell body of ammunition.

There are two kinds of ‘fuzes’—mechanical and electronic. ‘Electronic fuzes’ uses a different mechanism to start the explosion than the mechanical one and target sensing and firing functions are achieved through electronic circuits.

Not to speak of militaries in developed western countries, even countries in India’s neighbourhood have replaced ‘mechanical fuzes’ with electronic ones which are reliable, accurate, light-weight and compact.

The Indian Army started the shift towards ‘electronic fuzes’ in 1993 and a decade ago, placed its first big order. In 2009, it classified ‘mechanical fuzes’ as obsolete but had to rescind its classification due to non-availability of the ‘fuze’.

The national auditor’s report says: “In March/April 2009, Army declared ‘mechanical fuzes’ as ‘obsolescent’ and its procurement from OFB (Ordnance Factory Board) was stopped. However, no alternative source development for ‘electronic fuzes’ was undertaken by MoD (Ministry of Defence). In order to overcome the deficiency, DGQA (Directorate-General Quality Assurance) further changed (May/June 2011) the status of ‘mechanical fuzes’ from ‘obsolescent’ to ‘current’.”

What is more is that even after collaborating with two foreign manufacturers Fuchs Electronics, RSA and Reshef Technology from Israel, Indian state-owned firms ECIL (Electronic Corporation of India) and BEL (Bharat Electronics Limited) that mainly manufacture military equipment, have failed to indigenize the ‘fuzes’.

“The import material content in ‘electronic fuzes’ produced by ECIL was still around 60 per cent as of December 2017. Further BEL achieved 50 per cent indigenization as of August 2016 against scheduled timeframe for the absorption of technology by January 2017,” the CAG report said.

The report comes at a time when the OFBs and state-owned defence PSUs are coming under increased scrutiny for lack of accountability, under-performance and other deficiencies.

There is also a proposal to convert the ordnance factories under the OFB into a 100 per cent government-owned PSU “to provide functional and financial autonomy and managerial flexibility so as to enable the organisation to grow at a faster pace and play a greater role in defence preparedness of the country while also adequately safeguarding the interests of the workers”.

There are 41 ordnance factories under the defence ministry’s production wing that produce weapons, ammunition, equipment, clothing, etc.

In 2017-18, “the ordnance factories achieved the production targets for only 49 per cent of items. A significant quantity of Army’s demand for some principal ammunition items remained outstanding as on March 31, 2018, thus adversely affecting their operational preparedness.”

For 2017-18, the OFB received a budgetary grant of Rs 15,597 crore from the public exchequer.

The CAG report also said: “Major shortfalls in production were noticed for eight types of empty fuzes mainly due to material constraints and quality problems. This resulted in slippages in the issue of related ammunitions/spare filled fuzes to the users leading to critical deficiency of seven types of ammunition (32 to 74 per cent) and five types of spare fuzes (41 to 94 per cent).”