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Defence indigenisation
Government should stop paying lip service
by Gurmeet Kanwal
The
Defence Minister, Mr A K Antony, has repeatedly exhorted the armed forces to procure their weapons and equipment from indigenous sources in recent months. It is a well-established fact that no nation aspiring to great power status can expect to achieve it without being substantively self-reliant in defence production. However, it is not the armed forces that are the stumbling block. Unless the government drastically reorients its policies, the import content of defence acquisitions will continue to remain over 80 per cent.India’s procurement of weapons platforms and other equipment as part of its plans for defence modernisation must simultaneously lead to a transformative change in the country’s defence technology base and manufacturing prowess. Or else, defence procurement will remain mired in disadvantageous buyer-seller, patron-client relationships like that with the erstwhile Soviet Union and now Russia. While we manufactured Russian fighter aircraft and tanks under licence, the Russians never actually transferred technology to India. Although the country has now diversified its acquisition sources beyond Russia to the West and Israel, recent deals have failed to include transfer-of-technology (ToT) clauses. The much-delayed MMRCA deal with Rafale also appears to have run into rough weather on this account. If this trend continues, India’s defence technology base will continue to remain low and the country will remain dependent almost solely on imports. Whatever India procures now must be procured with a ToT clause being built into the contract even if it means having to pay a higher price. The aim should be to make India a design, development, manufacturing and export hub for defence equipment in two decades. Though it seeks to publicly encourage public-private partnerships, privately the government continues to retain its monopoly on research and development and defence production through the DRDO, the ordnance factories and the defence PSUs (DPSUs). The latest Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) was amended in April 2013 to reflect the current thinking on ‘buying Indian’. However, in effect it still favours the defence PSUs over the private sector. MNCs are allowed to bring in only up to 26 per cent FDI as against 74 per cent for non-defence sector joint ventures. Though the procurement of weapons and equipment worth more than Rs 300 crore from MNCs has been linked with 30-50 per cent offsets, it is doubtful whether the economy is ready to absorb such high levels of offsets. Since its inception in 1958, the DRDO has achieved some spectacular successes like the missile development programme, but also has many failures to its name. Programmes like the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) and the Main Battle Tank (MBT) Arjun have suffered inordinate delays and time and cost overruns. However, to its credit, the DRDO worked under extremely restrictive technology denial regimes and with a rather low indigenous technology base. The DRDO is now in the process of implementing the report of the P Rama Rao committee that had asked it to identify eight to 10 critical areas that best fit its existing human resource pool, technological threshold and established capacity to take up new projects. And it must scrupulously stay out of production. The private sector has shown its readiness and technological proficiency to take up the production of weapons and equipment designed and developed by the DRDO and must be trusted to deliver. The DRDO must now concentrate its efforts on developing critical cutting edge technologies that no strategic partner is likely to be willing to share; for example, ballistic missile defence (BMD) technology. Other future weapons platforms should be jointly developed, produced and marketed with India’s strategic partners in conjunction with the private sector. The development of technologies that are not critical should be outsourced completely to the private sector. Also, the armed forces should be given funding support to undertake research geared towards the improvement of in-service equipment with a view to enhancing operational performance and increasing service life. Gradually, the universities and the IITs should be involved in undertaking defence R&D. This five-pronged approach will help raise India’s technological threshold over the next two decades by an order of magnitude. The defence production process must provide a level playing field between defence PSUs and private Indian companies forming joint ventures with MNCs where necessary. The amount of FDI that MNCs can bring in must be raised to 49 per cent immediately and to 74 per cent in due course to make it attractive for MNCs. However, no MNC that is unable to provide transfer of technology - either due to the home country’s restrictive laws or due to proprietary considerations - should be considered for future defence acquisitions. India cannot leap-frog to a higher defence technology trajectory virtually overnight. Transforming a low technology base to a higher plane will need time, patience and large-scale capital investment. It will also need strong support across the political spectrum. In the interim period, inevitably, there will be a further dip in defence preparedness. This short-term weakness in capacity building will need to be carefully weighed against long-term gains that will be strategic in nature. The risk involved will require fine political judgement backed by sound military advice. As the largest importer of arms and equipment in the world, India has the advantage of buyers’ clout. This clout must be exploited fully to further India’s quest for self-sufficiency in the indigenous production of weapons and equipment. The immediate requirement is to think big in keeping with the country’s growing economic clout and to plan for the future with a level of confidence that policy planners have not dared to exhibit before. In 10 to 15 years India must begin to acquire most of its defence equipment needs from Indian companies-with or without a joint venture with an MNC. Only then will the era of self-reliance in defence acquisition truly dawn on the country. It will be a difficult quest, but not one that a great nation cannot
realise. The writer is a Delhi-based strategic analyst.
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MIDDLE |
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The cheer-leaders!
by B.K. Karkra
Pope Gregory
the Great (AD 540-604) once saw some English women being sold in to slavery in a Roman market. As was the prevailing practice, they were exhibited for sale naked. Gregory, who was then only a Benedictine monk, was so impressed with their beauty and grace that he spontaneously remarked: “Non Angli, sed Angeli sunt” (They are not English, but angels).He instantly thought of going to England to convert the country to Christianity. Somehow he could not make it. The task was left to his successors. Let us move our mind now to a bunch of scantily-clad shapely females, perched on a dais on the one side of a cricket field, doing dutifully what they are paid to do —dancing wildly as if in a truly ecstatic stance over the hitting of boundaries and the falling of wickets, flailing limbs, smiling mechanically all the while, blowing kisses all around, receiving lustful glances and lewd remarks from the spectators. The scene of the Roman slave market of the millennia gone by is right in front of you. Bodies may not be at sale here, but beauty certainly is. They are surely there to enable the organisers to take out money from our pockets on the quiet by playing upon our weaknesses. However, what these so-called cheer-leaders reflect is light-hearted artificiality and unnaturalness, if not cheapness. While the game is on, the cameras often cut to some naturally expressive faces of the sleeping or yawning babies, amused young women, old folks enjoying the game, relaxed looking VIP`s and lustily cheering youth. Some come here with funnily painted faces, masks and placards to invite the attention of the cameras on themselves. There is always some newness and freshness in the expressions of joy, astonishment and disappointment on these faces in the crowd. Some could even be noticed praying for their side visibly. All this is amusing and enjoyable. On the other hand, the artless gestures of the cheer leaders, repeated over and over again, are just boring. It is only their glamour quotient — beautiful faces, well-endowed busts and shapely thighs that interest the spectators. The feel-good factor about them may be more effectively at work in the post-match parties, where the players and the selected guests have a chance for a closer interaction with them. Why do these accomplished ladies fall on one another to get picked up as cheer leaders? It could not be for money alone. Perhaps these young women are equally keen on visibility in the audio-visual media. It is though doubtful if this exposure in any way promotes their careers in the field of modelling, television, films, etc. They really do nothing here in terms of dialogue delivery, facial expressiveness and other gestures to give a glimpse of their acting talents. True, as Wordsworth says, “a thing of beauty is joy forever”. These pretty damsels can create a great feel-good ethos among the spectators and the TV viewers if allowed to display themselves in a more natural setting. For instance, they could be made to sit in anonymity at some selected safe places among the spectators in the stadia and the cameramen asked to focus on them occasionally to catch them in their
naturalness.
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OPED
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Need of the hour or programme of chaos?
The Four-Year-Undergraduate Programme (FYUP), recently announced by the VC, Delhi University, has stirred a hornet’s nest. There are fears that this may destroy DU’s federal structure and break up academic interconnectivity between innumerable affiliated colleges
Ratna Raman
Students at a Delhi University college. Under the Four-Year-Undergraduate Programme, the teaching time has been reduced.
Tribune photo: Manas Ranjan Bhui |
It
is a definitive moment for young adults who come from schools, good, middling or ill-equipped, to enrol in various disciplines of interest at great universities in Indian cities. A majority of Indian lives are lived in the crosshairs of stretched resources and amenities, unequal access to infrastructure, disparities in income and living standards, and disturbing socio-political formations. Today, we are witness to changes introduced by an elite administrative order that attempts to deflect fundamental problems at the grassroots level. The impending changes in higher education fall in this category and refuse cognisance of the burgeoning needs of Indian students.Until recently, Indian university education extended parity to a very diverse student population. State-funded Central universities provided level playing fields for students from very diverse economic and cultural groups all over India. Despite the influx of students, over the past 80 years, university education has been accessible and empowering for every academically inclined young person. In fact, the inability of our schooling systems to provide a free and equal education has been somewhat mitigated by the performance of our liberal arts universities. Salvaging dreams of cost-effective and quality-education, our central universities enabled student enrichment and empowerment and outstanding results, despite great odds. Graduates from India’s liberal universities have made their mark in every field, excelling in their chosen fields of specialisation all over the world. All this is set to change irrevocably. Under the earlier cost-effective programme at Delhi University, students graduated with honours in a chosen subject alongside rigorous interdisciplinary credit courses. Students could also opt out of specialisation, learn around a cluster of linked disciplines and receive a Bachelor’s degree in commerce, humanities and the sciences. Both honours and non-honours degrees were awarded at the end of three years. Currently, the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University has unleashed a Four-Year-Undergraduate Programme (FYUP). This is poised to destroy DU’s federal structure, break up academic interconnectivity between innumerable affiliated colleges and eventually push the University towards sustaining itself as a self-financing institution. The protocol of the self-financing university powered by student loans has come to us from American shores. Inspired by the statistics of lifelong student debt stockpiling throughout America, the ruling party has possibly collaborated with DU’s administrative head to create generations of unthinking young Indians, crushed by educational debt. The syllabi for FYUP, cobbled in haste and secrecy is now on various websites. It disproves at first glance mendacious ministerial pronouncements in Parliament claiming FYUP’s commitment to knowledge development. Across disciplines, syllabi have been truncated. Under FYUP, students must do 11 Foundation Courses, 6 Discipline II Courses and 20 Discipline I Courses which are the mainstay for specialisation. The 11 compulsory foundation courses are to be taught to a disparate spectrum of learners. They will, perforce, need to be pitched at rudimentary levels. Discipline I has 20 courses and all courses are compulsory. Course content across disciplines reveals a truncation, reshuffling and inexplicable gutting of texts. Academic rigour in all specialisations has been curtailed, yet students will need four years in order to learn far less. Teaching time has been halved and the teaching units that are to be taught per paper have increased as a result of cut-and-paste methodologies. Students will be doing a larger number of watered-down courses per semester over four years. These are clear indicators of a major reduction in knowledge dissemination and assimilation, contrary to the minister’s claim. The increase in duration and costs has been compounded by the prioritisation of quantity over quality. The recent induction of OBC students to DU’s three-year programme has put a great strain on the university’s existing resources and infrastructure. Classrooms are ill equipped and overcrowded, and violate UGC recommendations of optimal class strength. Laboratories, auditoriums, tutorial rooms, sports grounds and libraries are either non-existent or in a state of abysmal repair. Permanent appointments have not been made for many years. The semester system was devised and introduced at Delhi University to deflect attention from the infrastructural problems plaguing the university. It has effectively highlighted the shortfalls between projected teaching, learning and assessment targets and actual teaching and learning and evaluation in real time. The recent July 2012 and January 2013 semesters fell apart at the end of eight weeks, with festivals and ill-conceived mid-term breaks. The mad scramble after the mid-term break last semester sent thousands of ill-equipped students to the examinations. This also holds true for the current semester in progress. Examination results generated through a quasi-mechanical assembly-line technique of evaluation (one answer paper is evaluated sectionally by three teachers) has reduced examiners into jugglers of reductive statistics. Answer sheets, no longer bound by the secrecy code, sport individual college code numbers on the cover page. For reasons so far unknown, secret moderation committees award and subtract marks for internal assessment submitted by individual colleges, challenging the very credibility of marks awarded in the university examinations. The High Court judgement on the DUTA writ, challenging the introduction of the semester system for undergraduates at DU has been kept in abeyance since December 2011. Queries from the honourable judges asking the university administration why no reviews were in place for the semester system were never placed before the academic and executive councils. The university administration however moved on to FYUP. Currently, students in their first semester are required to opt for three courses. Shortage of time hampers student ability to conceptualise and internalise teaching inputs. Under FYUP, students will have to juggle with five or more courses over eight semesters. Down-sized course content is being rationalised as enabling students to manage an increased number of courses per semester. In which case, providing exit points at the end of two and three years under false assumptions that thirty per cent or more of undergraduate students are unable to complete three years at the university because of marriage, ill-health and mishaps within families, seems altogether erroneous. However, the dilution of academic rigour in its entirety in undergraduate programmes and the provision of multiple exit points simultaneously is strategic to the dismantling of the very bulwark of higher education Students exiting the university at the end of two or three years will be poorly equipped with critical, analytical or comprehensive understanding of courses of study. Application skills imparted to them will not turn them into entrepreneurs, in the absence of cold cash. Oddly enough, we don’t have resources or space to nurture cultural activity or sports, let alone courses allotted to the advancement of “mind, body and heart”. However, continuity with schooling systems will be established by the reduction of course content. It is common knowledge that CBSE and ICSC prescribe textbooks and then edit them by demarcating sections of the text book as outside of the prescribed syllabi each academic year. FYUP’s follow up in this direction is admirable. For example, the Discipline I course in English requires that teachers teach only Books III and IV of Gulliver’s Travels. Books I and II, seminal to any understanding of Jonathan Swift’s oeuvre, are to be consigned to the dustbins of oblivion. As inheritors of an anomaly-ridden academic programme with truncated course content, students in their fourth year will have insufficient grounding and will be poorer by many readings in their chosen specialisations. Their punishment for staying on will involve the rustling up of research papers. It is a strange pedagogical logic that waters down academic rigour, restricts reading and expects original thought and writing from young people who have been assessed on the basis of multiple-choice questions through most of their school years. Fringe benefits will accrue to beleaguered photocopying kiosks that no longer need to fear the intimidating, bullying ire of publishing houses. They will not need to reproduce materials from books any more. Instead, they can concentrate entirely on recycling projects and research papers and assignments that will generate new commerce, semester after semester in the years to come. The photocopier’s kiosk will be the new nerve centre of the university, imbuing fresh meaning to “Hole- In-The-Wall-Education.” In the years to come, this will be replicated in each and every Indian city as FYUPs will be mandatory, for the uniform progression of the nation. Space crunch and resource crunch will then be blasts from the past. This again will be largely unproblematic because private foreign equity will swing by to provide expensive quality education for the few that our current establishment really cares about. Already, protocols in health, industry, technology and agriculture come to us from beyond the seas. It is only befitting that we allow ourselves to be schooled in order to manage these huge inputs and FDIs. Nation building, level-playing fields, access and equal opportunity are old-fashioned ideas from a bygone century. The need of the hour is the membership of the few in a bold, new, globalised, club. The writer is associate professor, English, at
Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University
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What is the Four-Year
Programme? The Four-year Undergraduate Programme is divided into eight semesters. There are 20 Discipline I Courses (DSC I -major credits) over eight semesters for an honours degree. Of these, two courses each are in I and II semesters, two each in III and IV semesters, three each in V and VI semesters and two courses and one research paper in each of the last two semesters, that is in VII and VIII semesters. There are 11 compulsory Foundation Courses on science and life, mathematical ability, IT, language and literature, geographic and socio-economic diversity etc over the I-IV semesters. Six Discipline II (DSC II-minor credit) courses that the student can opt for alongside Discipline I from the III to VIII semesters. There are five Application Courses to be completed between II and VI semesters. Integrated Mind Body Heart: One course each in semesters I and II Curricular Activity : One course on sports, cultural activities
NSS, MCC in semesters III-VIII Multiple exit points: Diploma at the end of two years, Degree at the end of three years. Graduation with honours at the end of four years. — R.R
The American system
 University education in the US is not a universal good. It is for the few and of the few.
American universities have great infrastructure and huge funding.
Student strength at a single American university is less than or equal to a single college at Delhi university.
The academic standards of American undergraduate is usually at par. The four-year interdisciplinary graduate programs allows them choice of over a hundred subject options that are rigorously academic.
Real choice of specialisation exists. First and second semester courses are not elementary or remedial in nature.
Community colleges are public institutions offering a two-year program catering to the needs of school students from diverse backgrounds and of different ages
Two years at a community college enables students to join a liberal arts college or the workforce
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