http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/...tic-hassles-serious-differences/1/348124.html
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The day: January 7, 1986. The place: a conference room in Delhi's South Block which houses the offices of the prime minister and the Defence Ministry. The occasion: a hush-hush presentation for the prime minister on the weapon system for the future. The Army, Navy and Air Force chiefs trooped in and awaited the arrival of Rajiv Gandhi.
Already present in the room were the ministers of state for defence and defence production, the three secretaries in the Defence Ministry, the chairman of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Bangalore and a host of high level functionaries and scientists. When the lights dimmed, scientists of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) unveiled detailed plans to manufacture an indigenous, high-technology, light combat aircraft (LCA) of awesome capabilities, required in large numbers by the Indian Air Force to replace its MiG-21 and Ajeet squadrons.
The LCA project had till then been in gestation - for five years - and its future had remained the subject of impassioned debate around the central question: could India's aeronautics industry design and produce an entirely new, low cost and agile combat aircraft to outperform the F16? The clear message at the January 7 presentation was "yes" as the designers had evolved a viable design for the LCA. "We are going for a tailless delta wing," Dr V.S. Arunachalam, scientific advisor to the Defence Ministry confided to India Today.
The LCA, he said would primarily be an air superiority fighter with a secondary close support role and some interdiction capacity. "The LCA will be a reality: there's not an iota of doubt about that," added Dr Kota Harinarayana, the 42-year-old leader of the 300-man LCA project team.
Whether in the corridors of the Defence R&D department in Delhi, or in the Bangalore offices of the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) the apex body which oversees the design and development of the LCA, there is an infectious enthusiasm that the LCA prototype will fly by 1989 and that it will catapult India into the technological super league of nations who produce their own frontline fighter planes. This enthusiasm reportedly infected even the prime minister at the presentation, but he exhorted the scientists to ensure they delivered a state-of-the-art plane.
But enthusiasm and optimism about the country's ability to fabricate and equip the LCA within the country cannot erase the effect of the tremors which shook the LCA project some months ago when its two top men - ADA director-general Dr S.R. Valluri and chief designer Raj Mahindra resigned. The issues raised by those resignations remain, and since these issues are larger than the personalities involved they can still bedevil the project.
A reputed scientist who served for 19 years as director of the National Aeronautical Laboratory, Valluri, 61, found his efforts being frustrated by the lack of coordination among the departments and agencies involved in developing different systems for the LCA.
"My basic problem was that the ADA's writ did not run beyond the four walls of its office," said Valluri who has penned his views on the project and its problems in an article awaiting publication which India Today managed to secure.
"...the Aeronautical Development Agency, which has been set up to fund, manage, and monitor the LCA programme has the total responsibility but not the authority to have its decisions implemented. It can function only through consent and consent was not always forthcoming....
The societal structure was conceived for the ADA to give it more freedom...but with authority and responsibility divided, it got more encumbered with bureaucratic red tape. In a sense, design was being dictated from Delhi instead of being left to the designers to worry about."
These are serious charges and they stem mainly from Valluri's differences with his boss Dr Arunachalam on the need to establish institutional linkages between the R&D units designing the LCA and the production units which will manufacture the airframe, engines and subsystems for the aircraft. Dr Valluri, who favours setting up a department of aeronautics, argued that unless these activities were coordinated, the LCA programme would slip.
Alternatively he wanted the LCA engine development programme at Bangalore's Gas Turbine Research Establishment (GTRE) to be funded and monitored by ADA.
But GTRE bosses and Dr Arunachalam had different ideas. Dr Valluri charges in the article that people opposed to setting up a unified department of aeronautics were "protecting vested interests". He wrote: "Any suggestions...for integration of R&D and the industry were thought to be greed on the part of the people making such suggestions."
The Government had to re-examine the organisational structure of aeronautics and the ADA, specially if it wanted the LCA programme and other sanctioned aeronautics and missile prototype development programmes worth Rs 2,000-crore to succeed. The prototype development programme for the LCA alone has approved outlay of Rs 600-crore.
Sources say that in September 1985, Valluri had put much the same views in a letter to the then defence minister P.V.Narasimha Rao who subsequently summoned Valluri. But the meeting never took place because Rao lost the defence portfolio in a cabinet reshuffle.
According to these sources. Valluri had informed the minister that he was resigning because of a "crisis of confidence" which made it impossible for him to work with Arunachalam. Arunachalam had asked him to "ease out" the LCA's chief designer Raj Mahindra who had been re-employed with the LCA project after retiring as managing director of HAL.
Valluri took the stand that if Mahindra left, the LCA project would run into trouble and could even get derailed. Valluri makes no secret of his admiration for Mahindra. "He is a genius where aircraft design is concerned." he says. "If there is a single person responsible for the evolution of the LCA design it's Mahindra. I have spent 40 years in aeronautics and in my judgement, there is nobody comparable to him in India. I consider it a privilege to have worked with the man."
Even Arunachalam concedes Mahindra's capabilities as a designer, but, he says, "there were continuous attacks on Mahindra in Parliament and Dr Valluri felt I was not doing enough to defend Mahindra. I thought I was. I was also continuously looking for younger people to work with them: that might have bothered them."
Arunachalam denied he had asked Valluri to ease Mahindra out and asserted that their departure would not be a setback for the project. "The critical people in the project are now young - in their 40s," he said.
But, Valluri in his article counters: "Designers of such complex hardware are forged in the fire of practice and not in the vacuum of theory or wishful thinking....We will be condemned to pay a very high price as such programmes are too expensive for people to learn on the job. Good designers can be destroyed by lack of political support but they cannot be made."
Mahindra's removal, Valluri said was akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water. "Instead of nurturing our gifted we have witch hunted them." Without an experienced designer at the helm, the work of the LCA design bureau would be "like a cacophony".
Raj Mahindra, 60, the central persona around whom the storm has been raging, now leads a quiet life in Bangalore, worrying whether the LCA project will be allowed to take off. "The LCA is bigger than the people involved. If it helps to sacrifice me, I am prepared. This is the one chance to ensure that the Indian combat aircraft programme is second to none in the world," he said.
But how did he become controversial enough to start figuring in Parliament debates is the question.
It all began in 1959 when Mahindra, an aeronautical engineer with 10 years' experience in British aeronautical companies was selected by HAL. Mahindra was married to a British national and held dual citizenship, British and Indian.
When he joined HAL he sent the management a note asking what he should do about his British passport, HAL apparently filed the letter and Mahindra unwisely held onto his British passport. But this fact was known to all the chairmen and managing directors he worked under. Mahindra's problems started many years later when sensational press stories started appearing about a British citizen in a sensitive job.
When the matter was raised in Parliament the secretary of defence production conducted an inquiry, went through the original records and cleared Mahindra.
Newspaper stories also appeared saying Mahindra had misrepresented his educational qualifications while applying for the job.(these newspaper storywallas are still spreading pretty much the same muck on LCA for their foreign pay masters,even today in 2015!!!!)
He was cleared of this charge too by the secretary of defence production. After this exoneration Mahindra was re-appointed two years ago to the ADA on the understanding that he would become project director to guide the LCA through its crucial project definition phase.
When Dr Valluri took over, he too looked into the original files to convince himself that Mahindra was guilty of no wrong doing. Things appeared to be going fairly well for Mahindra and the LCA till May 28,
1985 when a calling attention motion by Congress(S) member Suresh Kalmadi came up in the Rajya Sabha. The same charges were repeated against Mahindra and the minister replied that they had been answered adequately by his predecessors.
Three days later, Valluri claims, Arunachalam asked him to ease Mahindra out and the resignations followed.
Valluri's views about organisational linkages between ADA and HAL were echoed by a HAL veteran who felt that the present organisational structure in the two was not conducive to design development, HAL is geared mainly to production, virtually a backyard workshop for the Air Force. Moreover HAL's different wings reported to different departments: design and research to the DRDO and production to Defence production. "I would put HAL's design and development wing under ADA", he argued.
This apart, there remains an all-round desire to maintain the indigenous character of the LCA project. Indian military aircraft designers have sat virtually idle for nearly 20 years since HAL's HF24 project folded up.
"The aeronautical community has been treated brutally for 25 years. We have lost two generations of aeronautical engineers. That's why we are now on a
swadeshi track," explains Arunachalam. And the LCA team leader Harinarayana aptly symbolises this
swadeshi spirit.
"I am a totally indigenous product," he proclaims proudly. "I have never studied or worked abroad." The topic of Harinarayana's thesis for a Ph.D. in aircraft design from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, was 'Designing an air superiority fighter'.
He will now have ample opportunity to put his theories into practice. His first major task is to complete the project definition phase during which the final configuration and shape of the aircraft will be frozen, the subsystems specified, the general lay-out drawings finalised and detailed costs and management structure worked out. Once this is complete - in the next six months - then work will start on the detailed drawings leading to the fabrication of a prototype.
Even reaching this far has not been easy. Preparatory work on the LCA began in 1980 when a high-level team headed by Valluri undertook a series of visits to foreign aeronautics companies to assess the feasibility of developing such an aircraft and the country's capacity to build it.
The team unanimously affirmed it could be done but some of the latest technology would have to be imported - primarily the radar, fly-by-wire technology and composite materials needed to make the LCA the extremely agile and versatile aircraft fitting the Air Force's specifications.
These technologies would be absorbed and later incorporated into the Indian design. While the Valluri team prepared its own feasibility report and the Government took the unusual step of commissioning similar feasibility reports from M.B.B. and Dornier in West Germany.
British Aerospace in the UK and Marcel Dassault in France on the basis of specific performance parameters spelt out by the Air Force. The Indian team then sat with the foreign teams to discuss their feasibility reports. Eventually all the available knowledge was incorporated into a final feasibility report and in July 1983, the Cabinet gave its sanction.
"Never in the last 25 years has the nation been closer to carrying through a programme of this magnitude," notes Valluri in his article, but "private and public dissensions have in the last few months tended to tear the programme apart.
Within the corridors of government, the differences are about the methodology for implementing the programme and evolving an organisation structure appropriate to it." Outside, views had been aired challenging the very justification for this programme, he said.
Coming from a man who virtually mid-wifed the LCA project through the difficult initial years, these remarks need to be heeded. At stake is the vital question of self-reliance and the country's ability to produce modern weapon systems.
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The ;link was from BharathRakshak post by Karan.!!!
SO it is the commonwealth game "genius" who threw the spanner in LCA tejas program.
I shudder to think what kind of whorehouse the congress ran as a govt!!!!
No wonder Modi is talking about congress mukth bharath!!!!
It is unimaginable what and who prompted Suresh kalmadi to repeatedly question Raj mahindra's loyalty , which led to both Valluri and mahindra resigning!!!!
No prize for guessing considering the expose of his latter COmmonWEALTH reputation!!!
You will drop dead if you read what I am going to post here again!!!!
http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/kalmadi-who-claimed-dementia-lectures-defence-committee-469414
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NEW DELHI: Suresh Kalmadi, who cited dementia while asking for bail last year, attended a meeting of Parliament's Defence Consultative Committee.
The 30-member committee is headed by Defence Minister AK Antony; it has MPs from different parties from the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. Their job is to supervise and review the long-term plans of the Defence Ministry and make recommendations to the ministry.
Mr Kalmadi spoke for 10 minutes about Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and the delays in introducing the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) in the Indian Air Force. The aircraft has been in development with HAL for the last 27 years, and though the air force has given an initial clearance for its operation, there's no clarity on when the plane will actually be inducted for use.
This was Mr Kalmadi's first appearance at the committee since he was released from Tihar Jail in January. He has been charged with corruption during his high-profile term as head of the committee that organised the Commonwealth Games in India in 2010. He was arrested in April last year for hiring time-keeping and scoring equipment from a Swiss firm for the Games even though its prices were unreasonably high.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has also accused Mr Kalmadi of violating foreign exchange laws while making payments to a London-based firm that he hired for the Queen's Baton Relay. The event, held in September 2009 in London, kickstarted the Commonwealth Games.
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can you believe this self proclaimed dementia afflicted guy kalmadi, sitting on a defence panel coming s straight from Tihar jail!!!
What kind of whore house was the UPA govt?
Why this man was so special to them? Any heavy financial links with the first family of the congress?
What madness to have such demented guys being allowed to speak on programs like tejas on Parliament's Defence Consultative Committee.?
HE could not be a lone elephant, he may be the public pressure point used by forces inimical to india's emergence as military power with strong links to the higher ups in congress.otherwise he would have been told to shut by the top cong brass, like they have booted out the congress overseas president juned Qazi on rajiv gandhi's foreign tour troubles,
.
