Transfer of Technology (TOT): Myth or reality?
Transfer of Technology (TOT): Myth or reality?
Transfer of technology has been a buzz phrase in India for defense acquisitions since decades. So far India has little to show for all the technology transfers and license production that have taken place.
I have heard the phrase being bandied by politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats, since my school days, nearly 40 years ago.
India has been manufacturing MiG-21 variants since the 70s. Let alone developing a new aircraft based on the MiG-21, HAL was never able to even improve the aircraft in any way - Adding a dorsal fuel tank, for example, as in the MiG-21 Bis.
India designed and developed the Marut HF-24 in the late 1960's with assistance from German designer Dr. Kurt Tank and a lot of British help. HAL could never come up with a follow up.
We license produced the Jaguar? What good did that do? Where did the technology that was transferred go?
Whether transfer of technology works or not is linked to the technology base that a country has developed.
Talk to any DRDO official and they tell you the Russian never transfer technology.
At Aero India 2009 the DRDO chief publically termed Russian TOT as a farce.
What DRDO officials mean is that the Russians don't tell us how to build their products from scratch. The question is not only - Should they be telling you how to do so? - but also - Can they effectively tell how to do - considering that we do not have a technological base matching theirs?
A large amount of metal alloys and composites goes into an aircraft. The alloys used differ from each aircraft component. The strength of the metal varies with the manufacturing process used to produce it.
When transferring technology should the manufacturer tell from where to source the metal or how to manufacture it? If your country hasn't mastered the manufacturing processes what good would that do?
Recently someone referred to the possible French and Swedish readiness to part with source code for their AESA radars. (I am not aware this is true.)
While getting the source code along with the radar helps, it cannot be construed as transfer of technology.
Anyone who has worked with software knows the complexities of imbibing code.
Any code is based on thousands and thousands of lines of library code. Is the library source also being offered? Even if it is being, you will need to spend months, possibly years, to understand its flow and logic.
How generic is the code? How much generic can it be? Hardware specific code tends to be less generic to facilitate faster development and processing. Reuse of code is also limited by continuous improvements in hardware and software.
Code that took 100 person years to develop cannot be mastered within one or two months, even if you deploy 2,000 people for hacking it, assuming the cost of deploying 2,000 top notch software professionals on the project makes economic sense.
The example, is applicable to most electronic components fitted on a fighter aircraft, each of which uses software.
No transfer of technology allows you to copy manufacture. You can only license produce the quantity negotiated. So the vendors hold back a lot of data, like wind tunnel and flight testing data that would make it easy to modify the aircraft.
Broadly speaking, with a TOT agreement in place, the manufacturer will share with you just enough information to allow sourcing non critical components from the domestic market, or certain acceptable foreign markets.
If we buy the Rafale, the French are not going to teach us how to build a fifth generation version of the Rafale.
Talking about French friendliness, here is a detail that I have mentioned elsewhere on this site. When they supplied us the Durandal runway denial bombs for use on the Jaguars, they missed out on a small detail that prevented the Jaguar from dropping it.
The IAF discovered the flaw years after acquiring the bombs, when Jaguars attempted to test fire them on a target runway in Pokharan for the first time.
Pre acquisition trials were conducted in France and since the bomb was so expensive IAF waited for the life of the first lot of bombs to nearly expire before testing them. Three Jaguars unsuccessfully attempted to release the bombs in front of the Defense minister, COAS and other top officials.
There were a lot of red faces that day, not just in the squadron tasked with the trials but right up the chain of command.
The software patch, when it arrived from France, took minutes.
the squadron was flying HAL manufactured Jaguars
