Defence ministry to focus on Chinese items in equipment, map supply chain issues
defence ministry
will focus on determining Chinese content in military equipment being offered to armed forces and undertake audits of indigenous content on platforms, vulnerability assessment of supply chains and detailed cost analysis of procurement.
The ministry, which has marked 2025 as the year of reforms and is reviewing its procurement processes, will rope in an external consultant with experience in cost and data analysis for a variety of activities focused on acquisitions.
Among the tasks selected is a review of indigenous content in capital acquisition cases. In the past, some vendors have overvalued indigenous content in cases where a significant part of the system or platform came from foreign sources. Another task will be to determine if content in systems being offered have been sourced from countries sharing a land boundary with India. This clause has been used to weed out Chinese parts and technologies.
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Some domestic companies have been found to be using Chinese content in the past, especially when it comes to drone and anti-drone systems. At times, this content is sourced from a third nation to mask its origin.
The external consultant will also help the ministry draw up supply chain vulnerabilities for critical compounds and monitor global market dependencies and risks.
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The ministry is also seeking to expedite acquisitions needed urgently by the armed forces.
Another task is carrying out valuation of patents and transfer of technology cases by
DRDO
. The impact of these costs on the final product delivered by the industry will be studied. In some cases, it has been found that private sector entities bidding for projects have quoted low to zero costs for developing prototypes, much lower than even the bill of materials projected by DRDO. This sparked fears that final cost could be on the higher side as companies may load excessive development costs on the end user, instead of DRDO.
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