Defence ministry inks mega Rs 6,900 crore deal for indigenous heavy-duty artillery weapons | India Information – The Instances of India

NEW DELHI: The defence ministry on Wednesday inked the round Rs 6,900 crore contract for manufacturing of 307 superior towed artillery gun methods (ATAGS) and 327 excessive mobility 6×6 gun-towing automobiles with personal sector corporations Bharat Forge and Tata Superior Techniques, within the first-ever deal for such indigenous heavy-duty howitzers.
With the signing of the deal for the 155mm/52-calibre ATAGS designed and developed by DRDO, the entire worth of capital procurement contracts inked by MoD within the ongoing fiscal stands at Rs 1.4 lakh crore. The PM-led cupboard committee on safety had cleared the ATAGS deal on March 19, as was first reported by TOI.
Defence secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh felicitated the challenge director of ATAGS — which has a strike vary of as much as 45-km relying on the ammunition — from DRDO’s Pune-based Armament Analysis and Improvement Institution throughout the ceremony on Wednesday.
“The procurement of this gun system marks a big milestone within the modernization of the Military’s artillery regiments, enhancing their operational readiness alongside the borders with China and Pakistan. Famend for its distinctive lethality, the ATAGS will play an important function in bolstering the Military’s firepower by enabling exact and long-range strikes,” an official mentioned.
Bharat Forge will manufacture 60% of the weapons as a result of it had emerged because the L-1 (lowest bidder), whereas Tata will produce the remaining 40%. “ATAGS will exchange outdated 105mm and 130mm weapons. Over 65% of its elements are sourced domestically, together with key subsystems such because the barrel, muzzle brake, breech mechanism, firing and recoil system, and ammunition dealing with mechanism,” one other official mentioned.
Officers say ATAGS have “wonderful” accuracy, consistency, mobility, reliability and automation, longer maintenance-free dependable operations because of their “all-electric drive expertise”, and may fireplace five-round bursts as in comparison with three-round bursts by different up to date overseas weapons.
The ATAGS, whose improvement started in 2013, has undergone a collection of protracted subject trials through the years. Lastly, in 2021-22, the winter trials had been efficiently accomplished at high-altitude areas in Sikkim, which had been adopted by summer season user-firing exams on the Pokhran subject firing ranges.
The continued Russia-Ukraine battle has once more pushed house the operational utility of long-range, high-volume firepower. Consequently, the Military is progressively stepping up induction of howitzers, missiles, rocket methods and loiter munitions, as reported by TOI earlier.
In Dec, as an illustration, the defence ministry inked a Rs 7,629 crore contract with L&T in collaboration with South Korean Hanwha Defence for the procurement of one other 100 Okay-9 Vajra-T self-propelled tracked gun methods, which have a strike vary of 28-38 km and may be deployed in high-altitude areas alongside the frontier with China.
Then in Feb, the MoD inked contracts value Rs 10,147 crore for high-explosive pre-fragmented prolonged rockets (45-km vary) and space denial munitions (37-km) for the indigenous Pinaka multi-launch artillery rocket methods being inducted by the Military. Pinaka, too, is being exported to different nations.
India has grappled with recurring scandals in import of artillery weapons, from the Swedish Bofors within the mid-Eighties to the South African Denel in 2005 and Singapore Know-how Kinetics in 2009, repeatedly derailing the Military’s modernization drive.