Bengaluru: Delivering the Air Chief Marshal L.M. Katre Memorial Lecture 2024 on Defence R&D – The Road Ahead, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) Chairman, Dr Samir V Kamat said that there is an aversion to risk and intolerance of failure in India due to which people end up taking less challenging projects.
“If there is a failure, immediately you get a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report saying that you have caused loss to the government. Questions are raised on who is accountable. That makes people take on less challenging projects,” he said.
Highlighting that many projects keep getting extended instead of them being closed due to this, Dr Kamat added, “This has to change. You learn a lot more from your failures than from your success. If you have to fail, fail fast, so that you learn and move on.”
Dr Kamat, who is also secretary, Department of Defence (R&D) said that this attitude is slowly changing as Defence Minister Rajnath Singh recently gave leeway for high-risk projects. “The Defence Minister has given us this leeway where if you say at the beginning of the project that this is a high-risk project, we will make an attempt, but if it doesn’t happen, we will close the project. This leeway has been given and we hope it will bring a transformation in the ability to develop critical cutting edge technology in the country.”
Adding, he also emphasised that India should improve its R&D spending with more investment from the private sector. “If you look at our R&D spend, India is spending only 0.65 % of our GDP on R&D. Whereas USA spends 2.83 %, China spends 2.14 %, Russia spends 0.98 %, France spends 2.19% and South Korea spends 4.8% of their GDP on R&D. The government is aware of this and there is a clear thinking that in the next four to five years we should move to at least 1% of our GDP on R&D. Hopefully, by 2035, we should rise to 2%.”
Regarding the indigenous fifth generation Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) project which got sanction from the Cabinet Committee on Security in March, the DRDO chief said the first prototype will roll out by 2028, and production is expected to begin by 2034.
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