Flotsam

20 June 19

Former Naval Chief Admiral Arun Prakash tweeted from Paris Air Show the HAL was missing, their bird- LCA was nowhere in sight even as Pakistanis were there with JF17s in both static and flying displays. The Modi regime which at the end of its first tenure singled out HAL for some unwarranted criticism and financial hardship, is not surprising. If any thing, it is very decisive and relentless in its ability to see through its decisions. So while the Navy is enthusiastically rooting for the LCA Naval variant, the Government is attempting to clear the decks for private players in military aviation in India. The second decision of the new term was lack of determination to revive Jet Airways, a player of a quarter century, of good performance and safety record, for its temporary crises of funds. So the value of the company tanked and now we will see a new round of consolidation in the civil aviation industry.
T-18 as a model was christened Vande Bharat and is now running between Delhi and Varanasi, the PM’s Constituency. The second one was planned between Delhi and Kolkata, while the 3rd and 4th were for connecting Delhi with Mumbai and Chennai. All this was reported widely in the media in 2018 when these novel coaches were first on trial near the ICF in Chennai. There were reports too that the model would be tried for Mumbai-Pune, Mumbai-Nasik and Mumbai- Vadodara. (https://www.livemint.com/industry/infrastructure/railways-to-soon-start-trial-runs-of-vande-bharat-type-trains-1559735768175.html) (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/engineless-train-18-may-link-howrah-and-delhi/articleshow/66409196.cms) There was talk of the Metros now running on imported coaches would eventually move to these indigenous coaches. This is in the face of exports of coaches to Australia from coach factories in India. (https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/made-in-india-metro-coaches-in-australia-306529-2016-02-01) Of course, these metro coaches are made by Bombardier, a Canadian firm, which has a factory near Vadodara in India, and French Alstom has also set up factory to manufacture Metro coaches for Indian metros locally now.
Between promise and delivery, what India has experienced is huge slippage. And both aviation and railways are heavy engineering segments, critical for India’s next stage of evolution as an economy. The Sardar Patel Statue itself was such a huge disappointment because it was made in China and not India, which was a lost opportunity for India to take up advanced and outsized metallurgy projects. Will the upcoming Shivaji statue on the Arabian sea be another Chinese one?
Many Indian analysts are agonising over how India’s manufacturing dreams have not fructified. This from a country with such a heritage of metallurgy, of manufacturing, of building mammoth monuments and more. Is is colonial legacy that we like to think of work as an ‘office space’ endeavour with a desk and a phone, pushing files? Do we not want any longer to dirty our hands? Or is it just that we suffer nerves and rather not trust our own technology or production?
In automobile industry we have not yet reached a point where a Tata or a Mahindra sells abroad like how Korean cars do. In mobile handsets, we ourselves are sold on Chinese models and all those indigenous handset manufacturing efforts came to naught. Now the next excitement in engineering is from electric vehicles, with cars, motorbikes and scooters on the anvil. If our own municipalities and towns are not going to embrace EV technology whole heartedly, limiting it to the modified carts that are replacing obnoxious smoke emitting traffic choking ‘tuk-tuk’! Just look around, talk to those poor chaps who drive the battery operated vehicles. They moan how difficult it is for them to charge the vehicles, with voltage fluctuations and power cuts. We still do not have fast charging Electric Charging Ports in a single city in India, leave alone our mofussil towns! And we are all set to introduce electric sedans, bikes and scooters in the next two years?

The clinching fact for this evident disdain for engineering is again a military example-The INSAS was an ambitious small arms design to manufacture project of the 1980s, and which fructified into a fairly functional and futuristic in some aspects small arms for Indian military. Instead of honing it, heaping attention on it and curing it for a successive generations of prototypes and models in manufacture, lobbies within and without the military derailed it so that now we will mass manufacture the AK 103 series for our military, designed and perfected for us by the Russians!https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-russia-close-to-inking-multi-billion-agreement-for-ak-103-assault-rifles/article26344245.ece
It is as if Indians think that intellectualism will alone feed them! Lofty ideas and ideals alone are enough for India to emerge as Vishwa Guru! These small matters of manufacturing and production, facilitation of industrialisation and scaling up of engineering talent, R&D, and output is flotsam! We will always have the Iron Pillar near the Qutub Minar to show off! Wont we?

PS: Unlike most advanced countries, India contributes zilch to R&D in new technologies, almost allowing the burden of such contribution to private players and academics. Few Indians care to understand how much support Huawei gets from the Chinese government in terms of finance and scientific institutional support for its current position as the world leader in 5G! I am sure that Budget 2019 will continue to ignore this critical aspect of all modern technological prowess.