Defence ministry inks mega Rs 6,900 crore deal for indigenous heavy-duty artillery guns | India News – The Times 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 techniques (ATAGS) and 327 excessive mobility 6×6 gun-towing automobiles with personal sector firms Bharat Forge and Tata Superior Programs, 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 whole 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-primarily based Armament Analysis and Growth Institution in the course of the ceremony on Wednesday.
“The procurement of this gun system marks a major 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 a vital position in bolstering the Military’s firepower by enabling exact and lengthy-vary strikes,” an official stated.
Bharat Forge will manufacture 60% of the guns 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 “ATAGS will exchange outdated 105mm and 130mm guns. Over 65% of its parts 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 stated.
Officers say ATAGS have “wonderful” accuracy, consistency, mobility, reliability and automation, longer upkeep-free dependable operations resulting from their “all-electrical drive expertise”, and might hearth 5-spherical bursts as in comparison with three-spherical bursts by different up to date overseas guns.
The ATAGS, whose improvement started in 2013, has undergone a collection of protracted area trials through the years. Lastly, in 2021-22, the winter trials had been efficiently accomplished at excessive-altitude areas in Sikkim, which had been adopted by summer season consumer-firing exams on the Pokhran area firing ranges.
The ongoing Russia-Ukraine battle has once more pushed residence the operational utility of lengthy-vary, excessive-quantity firepower. Consequently, the Military is progressively stepping up induction of howitzers, missiles, rocket techniques and loiter munitions, as reported by TOI earlier.
In Dec, for occasion, 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 Ok-9 Vajra-T self-propelled tracked gun techniques, which have a strike vary of 28-38 km and will be deployed in excessive-altitude areas alongside the frontier with China.
Then in Feb, the MoD inked contracts value Rs 10,147 crore for excessive-explosive pre-fragmented prolonged rockets (45-km vary) and space denial munitions (37-km) for the indigenous Pinaka multi-launch artillery rocket techniques being inducted by the Military. Pinaka, too, is being exported to different nations.
India has grappled with recurring scandals in import of artillery guns, 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.