Chennai. Delivering the chief guest address at an event held by Data Patterns (India) at their plant in Siruseri, eminent scientist and BrahMos Aerospace chief Atul Dinkar Rane on March 22 said that the BRAHMOS missile project has achieved 75 per cent indigenous capability.
The event was organised by Chennai-based defence and aerospace electronics solutions provider Data Patterns (India) to mark the delivery of 27th ‘BRAHMOS missile checkout equipment’ to BrahMos Aerospace.
“When we launched our first missile in 2004, we had only 13 percent of indigenous components inside, but in the next 25 years, we have reached 75 per cent,” said Atul Dinkar Rane, Director General BrahMos, DRDO & CEO & MD of BrahMos Aerospace Pvt Ltd.
Achieving 100 per cent indigenous capability is not possible since the project is a joint venture with Russia and the country is dependent on Russia for some technology, he further added.
BrahMos Aerospace is a joint-venture between India’s DRDO and Russia’s ‘Military Industrial Consortium’ NPO Mahinostroyenia (earlier known as Federal State Unitary Enterprise NPOM of Russia).
He said some technologies are still provided by Russia and BrahMos Aerospace has no plans to indigenise them at the moment. However, without quantifying the savings, Rane said that due to 75 per cent indigenous technologies, the overall cost of the BrahMos missile has come down drastically.
“Data Patterns has been associated with BrahMos Aerospace for more than two decades and the company is now designing and producing radars across the entire spectrum of defence and aerospace requirements,” said S. Rangarajan, CMD, Data Patterns (India) Ltd.
Stating missile testing is conducted at least once in a year during the missile lifetime of 10 years, Rangarajan said the company is also in the process of signing an export contract with a UK-based company for supply of single processing avionics for airborne radar, some subsystems like those used in BRAHMOS missile, to South Korea and radar to a NATO country.
“But these are not real exports. The real export is when we build the full equipment in India and give it to the Ministry of Defence and with the government permission supply it to the rest of the world,” he added.
