Col. J P Uniyal (Retd), Director (Business Development & Product Support), BrahMos Aerospace says that the Indian aerospace industry has the necessary strengths to evolve into a leading aerospace industry centre
BrahMos Aerospace is a joint venture between India’s Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) and Russia’s NPO Mashinostroyenia. BrahMos designs, develops, produces and markets BRAHMOS weapon systems including cruise missiles with participation of a consortium of Indian and Russian industries. Col. J P Uniyal (Retd), Director (Business Development & Product Support), BrahMos Aerospace spoke with DMI’s Sr VP Strategy Dinesh Mishra during the Aero India Show 2019. Edited excerpts.
India’s still-evolving aerospace industry: Challenge or opportunity
You are absolutely right that the global aerospace market share with India today is not as much as it should have been, given the requirement and the size of our country and the intellectual strength that we have got in our academia and our scientific fraternity, I feel that this can be addressed in two ways: firstly we have to nurture and consolidate the individual pockets of excellence that we have in our country. Secondly, we should adopt the latest, critical technologies that are not available in the industry yet. Today, organizations from around the world are coming to us to sell to us, but with the implementation of the aforesaid measures, tomorrow the whole world will come here to collaborate and buy. The requirement of aerospace components, equipment and weapons is huge in our county. Even our civil aviation sector is growing at a pace unheard of in any other economy – these are all big opportunities that our aerospace industry must take advantage of.
Leveraging inherent strengths for growth
Our SMEs work in different silos – we should enable a collaborative ecosystem where small enterprises join forces to create solutions to the user, be it for aircrafts, weapons system, or flight simulation systems with a common aim of improving aerospace manufacturing capabilities in India.
Positive developments
The aerospace industry is growing at a very fast pace; consider the success stories of Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pune and for that matter the recent development in Tamil Nadu, not to forget the evolving ecosystem in North India. That said, this is just the beginning – they have to go a long way. I believe that India as a whole has the potential, the government policies are in place and as a result we can see India producing indigenous battle tanks and guns comparable to the best weapons in the world.
Major challenges
Aerospace industry is facing challenges because the pace of scientific development around the world is fast. Consider the example of crude missile technologies that have advanced from subsonic to supersonic to hypersonic missile technologies [BrahMos Aerospace is developing a hypersonic cruise missile, BRAHMOS-II, which would fly at a speed greater than 5 Mach. – Editor]. There are rapid advancements in the area of weapon systems, now scientists globally are looking at space-based weapon systems, which once realized, had the potential of rendering every other weapon system useless – these are the subjects that require farsighted deliberations from intellectuals in academia, industries and the scientific fraternity.
Col. J P Uniyal (Retd), Director (Business Development & Product Support), BrahMos Aerospace
www.brahmos.com