March 8, 2025:
On January 5th the Indian made Dhruv helicopter suffered its 23rd accident. This occurred 23 years after the Dhruv was introduced. Hindustan Aeronautics, a private corporation, designed, developed and built the Dhruv.
Twelve years ago the Indian Navy put its first squadron of Dhruv light helicopters into service. These were used for patrolling, search and rescue, and anything else the navy needed. It’s been a difficult journey for Dhruv. In 2009 the Indian Navy bought six of the Dhruvs for evaluation and did not like what they saw. The main complaints were lack of engine power and poor reliability. These were considered fatal flaws for helicopters meant for SAR/search and rescue and ASW/anti-submarine warfare.
Dhruv entered service in 2002, as the Coast Guard and the other services got a few of them for evaluation. The army under intense pressure from the government to buy Indian and purchased 40 Dhruvs without thoroughly testing them. Then the army discovered that, although the purchase contract stipulated that the Dhruv be able to operate at high altitudes up to 5,000 meters, its engine was underpowered and could not handle high altitudes. So the army had to keep its older helicopters in service until the Dhruvs were upgraded.
The 5.5 ton Dhruv has had more problems than successes. By 2009, a series of crashes indicated some basic design flaws, which the manufacturer insisted did not exist. The navy disagreed, even though the fleet was desperate to replace over three dozen of its elderly Sea King helicopters. These were a 1950s design and the Indian Navy models were about 30 years old.
Nevertheless, work on the Dhruv continued. Early in 2013, the army received the first of over 60 Rudra gunship versions of the Dhruv. The army already had 47 of the Dhruv and 65 more on order. The Rudra carries a 20mm autocannon and up to eight guided missiles or 70mm unguided rockets. An ASW version can carry sonar gear and two torpedoes. The Rudra can also be equipped for electronic warfare. The Rudra has day and night vid cams, heat sensors, and a laser designator. The Rudra was basically a Dhruv with the additional sensors and stubby wings to hang weapons from. Without its weapons, Rudra can also be used as an all-weather transport or ambulance.
Although it is Indian made, until 2010, the Dhruv contained 90 percent imported parts. The manufacturer had kept quiet about this because at least half the parts in Indian made weapons are supposed to be made in India. Since 2010 the percentage of Indian made components has increased. As embarrassing as this revelation was, there were other problems that were more crucial.
For over three decades now India has been making strenuous efforts to create a local capacity to design and manufacture modern weapons. It hasn’t been easy, as military manufacturers in neighboring China are far ahead of Indian efforts. Unlike China, Indian manufacturers don't have the license to steal technology and manufacturing techniques. This means more weapons components have to be imported, even if quietly and without any publicity.
The 5.5 ton Dhruv was in development for two decades before the first one was delivered in 2002. Since then, over 400 have been built mostly for the Indian military, About twenty have been exported to eight countries. A series of Dhruv crashes indicated some basic design flaws, which the manufacturer insisted did not exist. This delayed acceptance of the Dhruv by the Indian Navy and Air Force.
The Dhruv can carry up to 14 passengers or four stretchers. Max load is 2.5 tons and endurance is about two hours. The Dhruv can also fly as high as 6,000 meters. Northern India has a lot of mountains, so operating at high altitude was a key design requirement.
Meanwhile more Indians ask why China developed a world-class weapons development and production capability in the last few decades while India has not? Mainly it’s about corruption and decades of India making it difficult for Indians to start and operate profitable firms that could produce consumer goods as well as military equipment. The United States became the largest economy in the world over a century ago by encouraging this entrepreneurship. Many other nations, including those in Europe, Japan, South Korea and China followed that example.
While making it difficult for Indian entrepreneurs, India tried to use government-owned weapons development efforts and defense manufacturers to locally produce weapons. These state-owned organizations were epic failures and continue to develop second-rate weapons or weapons that don’t work at all. Prominent examples include assault rifles, helicopters and jet fighters. The only successes have been with privately owned firms and that is what the government wants more of. New rules and laws to reduce restrictions on commercial firms are meant to encourage less dependence on imports. As with previous efforts in this area, the goals tend to be more aspirational than actual.
Indian government bureaucrats and procurement agencies have become quite effective at protecting their own interests at the expense of commercial firms and the needs of the military. This is a problem in all industrialized nations because that is the nature of government; to use their power to expand. Nations like China and Israel are notably different because China did not begin undergoing the industrial revolution until the 1980s. As usual, that produced spectacular results, which will be eroded over the years as the government expands, often at the expense of successful new firms. That is already happening in China, where the communist government fears the potential political influence of the largest and most successful firms. Israel is a special case because they have been under constant attack by their Moslem neighbors since Israel was founded in 1947. For Israel it has always been a matter of succeeding at developing new weapons or being wiped out.
India is different because it adopted a local form of socialism instead of free enterprise when modern India was formed in 1948. As a result, India has always had to import most of its weapons. Efforts to change this have failed so far, mainly because of corruption and unwillingness to tolerate competitive and efficient defense industries. That corruption that has been pervasive in India for thousands of years and makes imported weapons from nations willing to pay bribes to Indian government officials more attractive than allowing competitive Indian firms to develop and provide cheaper locally made equipment.
One bit of good news is that this form of corruption has been under heavy attack for more than a decade because of the Internet. Political parties could control mass media and much local news, but not the Internet. Fighting corruption has become enormously popular with voters, who learn that most Western countries supplying weapons to India are often very anti-corruption themselves and much more successful at it. When Russia was supplying over 80 percent of weapons imports, you had a supplier that was a dictatorship and quite comfortable with bribes and payoffs. For more than a decade Russia has been losing sales to Western firms. The culture of corruption still exists in Indian defense procurement, but it is under heavy attack. Even if no bribes were involved when buying foreign weapons, that would not fix the inability to create a competitive Indian weapons industry.
The reason for that has to do with why, for most of the last half century, most Indian weapons came from Russia. There were several reasons for that: politics, price and practicality. The policy was a decision by Indian politicians to be non-aligned during the Cold War. This conflict began just as India became independent from the British Empire. Still resentful towards Britain and the West for two centuries of colonial domination, India officially refused to take sides during the Cold War. Yet its relations with communist dictatorship Russia were much warmer than with the Western democracies.
Although India clung to democracy, the educated classes were infatuated with the promise of socialism. For several decades Indians abhorred the Russian form of government but admired their socialist approach to running their economy. It wasn’t until the 1980s that most Indian politicians admitted that the Russian economic model was all a fraud and not working. For India, this set-in motion the sort of free enterprise policies that China had employed since the 1980s.
By then it was too late for India. Decades of attempts to impose government regulation and guidance of the economy had created a huge bureaucracy that could not be easily dismantled because many of these jobs were used by politicians to reward supporters and get reelected.
Then there was the price of Russian weapons. They were cheaper than Western equivalents. This meant more could be spent on bribes and payoffs. Finally, there was practicality. India’s main foes were Pakistan and China. Pakistan had a much smaller population, economy and defense budget than India. Russian weapons were adequate for Pakistan. China was also poorly equipped, until quite recently, and separated from India by the Himalaya Mountains. Under those conditions Russian weapons were just fine for Indian needs.
Since the Cold War ended in 1991 all this has changed. Indian politics has changed and now officially wants to clamp down on the corruption, which everyone admits cripples the economy. Price is still important, but it’s been noticed that Russian weapons have slipped in quality and effectiveness since the Soviet Union collapsed. Pakistan is even less of a military threat, because Pakistan is even more corrupt and economically crippled than India. China, however, is another matter. China has managed to build a powerful and productive arms industry. All those Russian weapons India has no longer provide any degree of superiority. India needs Western-quality arms to maintain a competitive military for confronting China, but those are more expensive. It’s possible to make them in India under license, but the Indian industry has not been able to master high tech sufficiently to make this practical. In short, it’s no longer practical to tolerate an inefficient domestic defense industry.
Efforts to create domestic defense industries have been crippled by specific portions of the bureaucracy. The worst of these is the DRDO/Defense Research and Development Organization. Alas, DRDO became a monumental example of bureaucratic inefficiency, wasting billions of dollars and decades of effort on weapons systems that never quite became operational or when they did, they really weren't. DRDO was created in 1958 to provide government support and guidance for defense related research. But the network of research and manufacturing facilities DRDO established since then were more about patronage and plundering the taxpayers than in actually creating competitive defense industries. Even DRDO efforts to create low-tech weapons like assault rifles and other infantry equipment were failures, with sloppiness and inefficiency resulting in very uncompetitive weapons.
This situation is tragic and a growing number of Indians realize it. India, a regional superpower and the world’s largest democracy, with a population of over a billion, now finds itself in a very rough neighborhood and military efficiency is becoming a necessity, not just a worthy goal. To deal with that, India has always maintained large armed forces with an army with a million personnel. But keeping these troops equipped, for what is expected of them, has proved to be very difficult. The army keeps falling behind in replacing aging weapons and obtaining new technologies like modern missiles, smart munitions and night vision gear. Getting the money from the government has been the least of their problems. The biggest hassles are with corruption and failed efforts to develop local weapons production.
The latest government moves to change all that are not revolutionary, but evolutionary. As has long been observed, democracies always do the right thing, but often only after trying everything else. India still has not reached the end of the everything else list.