New Delhi: The world's second largest army is battling fire-power issues for the past many years. Unavailability of modern equipment and compulsion to use vintage or obsolete war machines has left the Indian Army in a fix.
Every arm including the infantry and air defence or artillery is facing shortage of equipments and ammunition, which has emerged as a critical area of concern.
Non procurement of artillery guns is not the only problem for the Army. Compounding the shortage is a series of accidents in ordinance factories as well as ammunition depots in last 15 years in which ammunition worth crores of rupees have been lost.
Several officers, jawans and civilians have also lost their lives in the fire accidents.
The fire accident at Central Ammunition Depot (CAD) Pulgaon, Army's mother ammunition depot, is one of the biggest incidents in the recent past. Nineteen people including two officers were killed in the blaze.
While the blaze at India's largest ammunition storage spread over 7,000 acres has been doused, but several burning questions remain.
A recent performance audit done by Comptroller Auditor General on Army’s ammunition management categorically highlighted serious issues pertaining to the ammunition supplied by the ordnance factories.
CAG report on the 2008-2013 period noted that even the products accepted by Quality Assurance were not found up to the mark and due to persistent quality problems, ammunition worth Rs 1,618 crore is lying rejected in depots.
Ammunition worth Rs 814 crore was declared unserviceable within its shelf life due to poor quality. Safety record of ordnance factories and depots, as frequent accidents show, is also not good.
When any ammunition meets with an accident, the Army impose a ban on the use of that particular lot. Such ammunition is kept segregated till its further sentencing. The CAG audit observed that ammunition worth Rs 3,578 crore was awaiting sentencing.
Moreover, ammunition worth Rs 2,109 crore was lying in repairable major condition awaiting repairs. The ammunition shortage is also often credited to inadequate supply by ordnance factories.
In order to build up ammunition stock level up to Minimum Accepted Risk Levels and to provide enough lead time to OFB for procurement of raw material and streamlining the production, the Defence Ministry placed a five year Roll on Indent on OFB in January 2010.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence in its recent report tabled in Parliament in May 2016 noted that despite taking OFB onboard for the order placement procedure, it failed to supply the targeted quantity, with shortfalls ranging up to 73% of the total types of ammunition.
The issue was highlighted by the CAG report on Army’s ammunition management in 2015.
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