We will now begin with the valedictory address by Shri Baba Kalyani, Chairman and Managing Director of Bharat Forge. This session will be moderated by Ambassador Sugjana Chennoi, Director General of NPIDSA. A warm welcome to both of you, sir. May I now request the Director General to please commence the session and take over the proceedings.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Let me begin by acknowledging the presence of Mr. Baba Kalyani, Air Chief Marshal Viveram Chowri, Marshal Narandeshwar Tari, and other esteemed participants, panelists, ladies and gentlemen. You'll all agree that we've had very rich discussions since yesterday, and in this session, it is also my role and duty not only to moderate the valedictory address but also to briefly say a few things about the issues that we discussed.
This is the last session, but as you can see, we've reserved some of the best for the afternoon today, and so it's going to be very enriching to listen to Mr. Baba Kalyani in a short while. I am purely the jester that's keeping the audience warmed up for the better things to come. Yesterday, the honorable Raksha Mantri made very relevant and thought-provoking remarks in his inaugural address, and you may recall that he spoke of the importance of harnessing new-age technologies to bolster defense capabilities, including disruptive ones such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, and swarm technologies. And these have also come up frequently in the course of our discussions. And a number of ideas have been proposed by a very large number of our eminent speakers, particularly through the special addresses that they have delivered here.
What is amply clear, however, is that harnessing new-age technology for defense capability development is an objective that cannot be achieved without building up domestic research and development capabilities as well as defense manufacturing locally in India. It also cannot be achieved without better civil-military integration and developing even closer links between academia, research institutions, end users such as the armed forces, the paramilitary forces, and others. Even more importantly, you will agree that there should be closer collaboration between the public and private sectors. I think a great votary of that is in fact here with us today. The private sector, in my view, should be supported and encouraged to excel and also compete with the public sector to give the public sector a run for their money, a run for their technology as well, and this will ensure that there are better outcomes overall. So the time is over when a distinction can be made between the public and private sectors in favor of the public sector. I mean, that era is over, as we've seen from the presentations also. Friends, what we need today is obviously a multi-domain and a whole-of-nation approach to harnessing new-age technology, and one of the key takeaways for me of this two-day conference is that unless new-age technologies are absorbed quickly and made use of through indigenous manufacturing in a time-bound manner, they run the risk of also being confined to the laboratories and perhaps becoming obsolete rather quickly.
Therefore, the process of translating technology or technological advances into a manufactured, deployable product needs to be curtailed in terms of timelines, and that also applies, as was mentioned by Chief Marshal Chowri, to the acquisition process also, but that's a separate issue. We've been reminded at this conference that profit is not a bad word and that technology has a better chance of success if it takes on a certain business identity as well. At the same time, it is also clear that when the private sector is not capable of making its own investments in critical defense technologies for whatever reason, the government must step in with flexible funding and accommodate failures too in the learning curve of startups and MSMEs with a long-term strategic outlook. So for a country like India, it is difficult to reinvent the wheel in each sector and each technology in order to keep up with the best in the world. This is not feasible. And that is why Atmanirbhar Bharat, in my view, in defense manufacturing retains a great deal of space for international collaboration as well, and self-reliance certainly does not mean it does not amount to self-sufficiency, but it does require a much greater push towards local value addition and indigenous dissemination, possession, dissemination of IP and relevant critical technologies.
The role of the private and the public sectors in India need to be complementary, collaborative, and competitive too for better outcomes, as I said a while earlier. And if sufficiently large domestic orders are not placed, the nation runs the risk of withering away of indigenous technologies and capabilities. As even a formidable defense giant manufacturer such as the United States has discovered to its peril with regard to its current capabilities vis-à-vis China in terms of the number of missiles or aircraft or ships that it can produce in a year. We keep seeing these startling statistics that are compared.
On the other hand, we can see that a country like China is strongly supporting its private startups and companies to develop dual-use technologies, which are then being increasingly absorbed in the armed forces. And I've seen this virtually every time I visit China, whether it's AI parks or other technology hubs. In India, when we look at leapfrogging, we perhaps also need to look at the balance between linear, spiral, and block development of various technologies. And there has to be a proper discerning look at what exactly we wish to do in this space: linear, spiral, block. There may be scope to devise flexible models based on the criticality of technologies or the need for certain futuristic technologies for the battlefield.
Friends, much is being done today to provide impetus to the military-industrial complex in India, and much more remains to be done. Today, the nation needs a common understanding and a common purpose for developing new-age technologies. So there has to be a vision basically at the very top, and it has to percolate down. Technologies need to be identified well in advance for the next 15 years. And those that deal with technologies the best must deal with technologies and confine themselves to dealing with that type of research and development and leave the manufacturing and the rest to others that know it better.
I do believe that today's new-age technologies, as speakers have said, and I'm convinced of what they've said, have a disproportionate impact on the battlefield, as was suggested during the course of our two-day conference. One thing is clear: a nation cannot win the future battles with supply chain dependencies. So while we collaborate in the midst of our self-reliance, we've got to be wise to these dangers. For me as a layperson, one of the startling examples is that an LCA Mark 1A or MK 2 will have a lifespan of about 30 to 50 years, and for the next 50 years, we will be looking at engines coming from elsewhere. I mean, I shudder to think of supply chain vulnerability there, but that's a different subject. Now, I'm very glad that I have been given this privilege by, may I call you my friend also of many years standing, Mr. Baba Kalyani, who has really agreed to come at short notice. I know that he's had to reshuffle his program to be able to come here, and as soon as he finishes, he's going back. So you can see that he's flown in only for this.
You're all aware that as Chairman and MD of Bharat Forge, he's actually one of the doyens of defense manufacturing in India in the private sector space. Bharat Forge's entry into this space began over a decade ago, if not more, when it showcased its first indigenous artillery gun. 2012 exactly. And that marked a turning point, I should say, for the private sector to participate in defense industry in India. He personally has drawn, in my view, on his military schooling and the company's metallurgical expertise to adapt Bharat Forge's forging capabilities to produce excellent artillery systems as well. And we all know that until 2010 or so, defense production in India was restricted to the public sector units, and the private sector was largely excluded despite earlier provisions for technology transfers, as was the case in the 1984 Bofors deal as well. The landscape clearly has shifted after Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014.
And largely due to India's initiatives, the Make in India initiative is something that comes to mind. I think the late Manohar Parrikar, after whom this autonomous institute is named, was also one of those in the forefront of opening up the defense sector to private players, and he also, I think, greatly promoted indigenization. So we will all agree that he, Mr. Kalyani, has particularly been in the vanguard of the indigenization program in India. And I would like to end by simply saying that India's push for modernization and self-reliance is both a strategic imperative as well as a patriotic and national mission. Modern wars, whether protracted or short-lived, whether conventional or subconventional, simply cannot be fought and won without a degree of strategic autonomy in defense and critical supply chains. And the Atmanirbhar Bharat mission in defense manufacturing, in my view, ensures the nation and ensures that we are guarded against manipulation and disruption imposed by external factors. So with these few words, I now have great pleasure in inviting Mr. Baba Kalyani to kindly deliver the valedictory address, and he's been kind enough to agree to take a couple of questions, though that's rather unconventional. I convinced him to do that. Yeah. Over to you. Thank you.
Thank you, Ambassador Jha, Chief Marshal Chowri, Marshal Tiwari, distinguished members of the armed forces, services, administration, and distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. You know, after hearing for the last about one and a half hours, starting with Air Marshal Tiwari's address, I mean, what he talked about in terms of creating a network of a service that can recognize what's flying in our airspace after the 1995 Puria arms incident, whatever happened, that's extremely impressive, and I feel very safe flying in the Indian air. So, you know, it's amazing what people can do if you are challenged.
We heard the lady from Ukraine talk about how the transition in the Ukrainian war happened from 2014 to 2022 and from 2022 to now, and there are a lot of lessons about this that we have to learn. Last Monday, on the 3rd of November, we had the Viksit Bharat session where the honorable Prime Minister was there and gave a speech about how his vision of Viksit Bharat can be achieved, and we had a small panel, seven of us. I was one of the panelists in that, and I was asked, I mean, we had three questions that we all had to talk about for three, four minutes each. It wasn't long speeches, but the last question was, in one word, can you explain what is required to be done in India to make this happen? So when my turn came, I said, trust. I think this is something that we lack very badly in this country.
Let me talk a little more about it. I don't want to talk about my company and what we do. We do a lot of things, not only artillery guns. We have been able to, we first designed our own gun that we designed along with DRDO. The ATAGS, which is probably the most advanced artillery gun on this planet today, is software-driven, is fully autonomous. It can have 20 guns working autonomously with single control. And we have many other platforms, we have almost 10 different platforms that we have designed. And the beauty of that was that I just picked up young engineers from our forging business and I put them on this job and gave them a mission. And this is what makes things happen. If you are able to convince a group of people that this is required, this is important for the country, this is important for the country's defense, then they do anything and everything to make that happen. And that's, I think, the example that Marshal Tiwari gave about what the Air Force is doing.
But most impressive for me was what I heard from the lady from Ukraine. But here is where, and I know some Ukrainians because we are working with some Ukrainian companies in another area. Here is where a group of young people, middle-aged people, engineers, scientists got together on their own, created products to defend their own country, and went on the front line to deploy those products, and their forces deployed those products. That's, I mean, in short, that's what really happened, and that is the best example of a civil-military fusion. You need civil-military fusion to do anything right. But to create a civil-military fusion, you need to create trust, and this is one thing that we lack in our country very badly. Our processes, procedures, whether it's acquisition procedures, whether it's, you know, after you produced a product, the testing procedures, I mean, all kinds of procedures which are antiquated, which just don't need to exist. I don't understand. You know, we built the ATAGS gun. We built a lot of guns. We exported 100 guns to Europe last year, and including the ATAGS. And now the army wants us to get our ATAGS tested on the FOPM. And FOPM definition in India is after you get an order, then only you can place orders for raw materials that you require. You cannot buy your raw materials before. I mean, how antiquated is this process? You don't have trust in a company that is doing your work. I mean, we have worked with the MOD and the Indian army for this for the last eight years. It's exactly the data that was shown in the Ukrainian system: 120 months to get product certified and bought, which was then reduced to 22 months. So we got to get rid of these things, and the underlying theme behind all this is lack of trust, and we got to get this lack of trust out of the system.
The second point is that what is Atmanirbhar? I mean, Ambassador, you know, I talked about Atmanirbhar. I think there was a lot of discussion from what I have seen. I watched some of the sessions yesterday online, and we discussed this even when the honorable Prime Minister addressed us in Bharat Mandapam on last Monday. What is Atmanirbhar and what is Viksit Bharat? The honorable Prime Minister has given a call that India needs to be a fully developed nation by 2047, India at 100. Now, to be a fully developed nation, he's also put some targets. We need to take our GDP to something like $30 trillion. Okay, we maybe plus minus five, it doesn't matter. But from where we are today, four trillion to 30 trillion, we're talking about a big jump. How is this going to happen in the next 22 years? We have 22 years more to make this happen. We are just about putting the policies in place for all the things we should have done 20 years ago, whether it's the policy of creating the AMCA, the fifth-generation fighter, and I was really happy to hear from you, Marshal, that you have a lot of technical people from the Air Force, and we have also bid for the AMCA, and if we ever get that program, that's where I'm going to go to get your technical manpower because you need it everywhere in the world. It is the military that works with industry to create whatever products you want to create. It's only in India that, you know, there's so much of distrust that nobody wants to work with industry to create this. And I think we got to get this distrust out of the system.
The second thing I want to talk a little bit about, I'll give you an example of Nokia. You heard of Nokia. Nokia was the first company that created the smartphone before 2007. The entire smartphone technology was with Nokia, which nobody else had. Apple didn't have it. Google didn't have it. None of those people had it. Now, why did Nokia fail? There's a very nice article by a Harvard professor which has come in the Harvard Review as to why Nokia failed. And Nokia failed because the CEO of Nokia started distrusting his own people, and the morale of his organization went down very rapidly. As a result of which, he had people who were only yes-men who were telling him things that he liked. There was nobody who was telling him what is wrong with the organization. It was a matter of two, three years that Nokia lost all the advantage that it had in smartphones. If you look at what makes a program successful, it is 5% strategy. It is 95% execution. Now, what is execution? Execution is all about people. It's not about technology. It's 5% technology. It's 95% people. People who are passionate, people who are ready to do things, people who are ready to make things happen.
Now, in our company, we started with artillery guns, then we went on to naval systems. I mean, today we build ships. Navy has so many shipyards and they build ships there. But what do they actually build? They only build the vessel body. The entire drive system of the ship comes from abroad. The guns on the ship come from abroad. Nobody's able to make this here, and we have this propensity in this country, especially in the system, that first you have to go to the public sector to ask them to make something. So Navy gave an order to one of the public sector units 20 years ago to make the guns. There are two guns on the naval ship. There's a 30 mm gun, which fires at a very fast rate, and there is a 76 mm gun. The Navy has decided not to go for the 127 mm, which is the bigger gun that many American ships and European ships use. But till today, nobody can make this gun. So we have taken up the challenge. Our 30 mm gun will be ready in March, and the 76 mm actually has gone for firing to Balasore. Now, these are the kind of things that are easily possible in this country.
You crowdsource innovation. I'll give a different meaning to the civil-military fusion: crowdsourcing innovation. You heard of crowdsourcing of funding money. Mr. Obama in his election, he actually got elected because he was able to crowdsource funding from a lot of people. Crowdsourcing innovation is the biggest advantage India has. This country has a very large young population. Our demographic dividend, and they're all educated. Many of them are engineers, STEM graduates, and they can make amazing things happen. And we need to start figuring out how to create a system. I mean, this is something for you to look at. Crowdsourcing innovation, and a lot of innovations can be crowdsourced. I mean, drones is a good example. All these thousands of drones flying in formation, these are all young people who are able to create that technology. It's not simple to get 5,500 drones flying in formation. So look at India, believe in India, believe that you can do it. That is Atmanirbhar. Yes, you need collaborations. You need to work with the rest of the world. You need to do all those things. But real Atmanirbhar is the ability to make things with your own knowledge and your own technology. And I think we have a huge pool of knowledge. We have some 800,000 engineers that come out of our institutions every year. We have these amazing IITs. I made a visit to IIT Madras a couple of weeks ago, and I was simply amazed to see the level of technology that is there in their incubation centers. There's one incubation center that is making a space rocket, Agnikul, and many, many other incubation centers. I mean, the whole 5G program came out of an IIT. So there are things that we can do which we still believe in our minds that it can't be done, and we have to figure out mechanisms to do it. But the fundamental mechanism that we have to figure out is how to create trust. How does one Indian believe in another Indian? How does the system believe in companies in the private sector? Because you have kept the private sector out till 2014. So we're talking about out of the 75 years, almost 60-odd years, you have kept the private sector out of the system. So it's a massive change in terms of mindset. It's a massive change in terms of how we think. It's a massive change in terms of our processes, decision-making processes. And unless those change, I'm afraid we won't make the progress that we want to make.
And my last few words are that there is capability in this country. There is technology in this country. There are people who can make things, fantastic things, fantastic products, fantastic innovations. We must learn how to tap this, and we must create this force in the service of our nation. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Baba Kalyani, for your scintillating remarks, as always very perceptive. And I think that big takeaway that we have is how to engage in crowdsourcing innovation from this great country of ours, which has so much talent, and a great deal of the talent is actually within the armed forces, where far too many men and women leave service very young and therefore are not fully utilized in terms of their expertise. So hopefully, you and others will also use that. Mr. Baba Kalyani has agreed to take a few questions. As I told you, it's unconventional after the valedictory address. We're not going straight to the vote of thanks by Colonel Vivek Chatta, my colleague, who is, by the way, Colonel Chatta has worked very hard to put this whole thing together. So on my behalf, I want to do my little vote of thanks to you, Colonel Vivek Chatta, and your excellent team at NPIDSA. So let me begin with, yes, Colonel Rajesh, please, also of our MPs.
Sir, in the United States, they have recently announced that CEOs of four top defense companies would be appointed as left colonels in the army, and they would bring certain expertise to the government. Assuming that you are also appointed in that particular position in the MOD, what is it that, so that's why I prefix it by assuming that you get a similar position in the MOD and the services, what is it that we can expect that you would deliver, sir? And also, the second part of the question is, what is that enabling environment you would expect the services and the MOD to give you so that it's a win-win situation for both?
Twist it around, not left colonel, field marshal. So now let's get his views.
Let me answer this another way. I have a lot of friends in the US in the defense business, and many of them, matter of fact, we are working with almost half a dozen companies. That's part of the collaborative process. In many, many systems, we are doing a lot of undersea systems for the Navy, very sophisticated, very complex, but since we have a large coastline and we need to defend our coastline, and underwater systems, because there are a lot of nasty guys running around our coastlines. And two or three of these companies, one has an admiral who is the CEO, retired admiral as a CEO, one has a general who is a CEO. So in the US, it's a very common practice that retired service people go and set up businesses, and because they are the ones who have tremendous knowledge of what is required and how to make it happen because they've been handling all those equipments, they know what the next steps have to be, and it's amazing what they do. This is a company in Connecticut, and you know, Connecticut coast has the largest shipbuilding yards of the US Navy, the submarine yard, the warship yards, and they make this equipment. It's called CICADA, which puts a radar array on the ocean floor and gets signals from there and then transmits the signal via satellite to a station which we are creating now in Visakhapatnam, where data will come in and then we have to send that data to a particular place in the NCS and analyze that data ourselves. So this is the kind of technologies we are all working with, and they are these people who bring this knowledge into the system. Now, bringing a civilian like me with whatever badge, title, or whatever you want to call it is not going to work. I think I'm good at where I am. I'm doing a job where it needs to be done. I can make products for our nation to keep it safe to whatever extent we can make. But I think that's a wrong concept in my opinion. The best people suited for the job are here, right here.
But perhaps it could work for startups and younger people who own their own businesses and not the likes of you. I mean, I'm talking about a younger crowd, but we take your point.
There are already enough platforms that have been created. For example, there is the Prime Minister's PMSTIAC, Prime Minister's Science, Technology, and Innovation Advisory Committee. I am a member of that committee. I've been for many years now. I'm the only industry person who is a member of that committee, and there are many secretaries of the government, there are some professors from the Indian professors who are settled there who are on that committee. And today, that committee is headed by Professor Ajay Sood, but they do remarkable work, and we do remarkable work in the committee. All this thinking, long-term thinking, strategic thinking of what is required to be done, nothing to do with defense, but at a national level.
Mr. Kalyani, you've actually been a trailblazer, as we have been following the trajectory of the growth of your firm and your own leadership. My question actually is a little general. You know, you keep hearing, it's a common thing, we talk about Viksit Bharat and whatnot, but our investment as a proportion of GDP is very low in R&D, and most of it actually is government-funded R&D. So where do you think the private sector, and some of our private sector actually, they have MNCs of global import and global heft, why is it that our industry leaders, why are they not actually putting, let's say, comparable amounts of money as is being put in the US? Thank you.
You know, I agree with you. I have no disagreement on that, but I am not part of that system, okay? I've been investing in R&D for the last 15 years, defense R&D, and I still haven't supplied one single item to the Indian armed forces. All right. My entire defense business today is exports. I am the largest producer of artillery ammunition in the world, on this planet. Okay. Bigger than the United States, by the way. So we have tremendous capability to do things. Of course, we now got orders from the Indian Army to supply guns, 180 guns. We got an order to supply small arms, a carbine, a very large quantity, but that will probably get into production by the first quarter of next year with all the processes and everything that's involved. We are working with the Indian Navy on some deep-sea systems, what I talked about, and that's largely happening out of the emergency procurement process because that's become a simpler process to make things happen because the whole system works less than 22 months. As a matter of fact, two months, you have a product, you go for a trial, you prove your product, and that's it. If it works, then you're competitive. You can get business with that. Similarly, we have got some drone business coming in. We have a very large aerospace division in our company. We work for all the three big engine manufacturers: Rolls-Royce, Pratt and Whitney, and another US company that makes engines. And except for Safran, we make everybody's engine components: turbine blades, shafts, rotors, all kinds of stuff. I was involved in the Kaveri engine program 30 years ago. I still remember those days. I was much younger in those days. I did a lot of hard work, produced the blade and the disc for the Kaveri engine. It worked, but the engine never worked. And that's a sad state of affairs that we have not been able to develop an engine. If it was given to the private sector 30 years ago, today you wouldn't need to import engines from General Electric.
Sorry, let me add to that query. So now, do you think that it's possible to have a new afterburner to be added to the, you know, dry Kaveri engine? Is any such permutation combination possible?
I don't think you can do that. It's not as simple as that. You have to design a new engine. But designing a jet engine is not rocket science anymore. We are developing small engines. We actually just developed a 45 kg thrust engine for application on our drones, long-range drones. So we can make drones that can go 800 to 1,000 kilometers with that engine. So this is now approved by ADA and CEMILAC, which is one of those steps that you have to pass anything to do with aerospace or aircraft. So it is very simple to do that, but then you got to the issue here: what is missing here? Trust. Why wasn't the private sector given this job 25, 30 years ago? Why is it today that the government is saying that the fifth-generation fighter should be made only by the private sector?
And what are the reasonable chances of India actually having its own fighter aircraft engine? Because the Prime Minister spoke about it on the 15th of August from the ramparts of the Red Fort, and therefore now it's supposed to be in mission mode. And so how do you see it?
It is not happening because we have contracted with Safran to develop the engine. Again, lack of trust.
