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NEW DELHI: Hit by heavy time over-runs and technical hitches in the production of a key surveillance system designed to give early warning on incoming missiles, India has sought Israeli expertise.
Launched three years ago, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) surveillance project christened 'Divya Drishti' was to become operational this year, but is running heavily behind schedule and now Israeli expertise is being sought for its completion.
Billed to cost Rs 570 crores, the ground-based over- horizon surveillance system will give the country capability to detect targets in space and close to ground in two angles almost 800 kms away and in another angle almost 450 kms away.
Elbit system of Israel has now joined forces with the DRDO's Hyderabad-based Defence Electronics Research Laboratory (DRDL), Electronic Corporation of India and Tata Power Company Limited to develop the futuristic system.
This is the second major project on which the DRDO has sought foreign collaboration for development, giving up its earlier insistence on 'go-lone policy'.
Earlier this year, DRDO floated international tenders for collaboration on development of its Kaveri aero-engine designed to power the Light Combat Aircraft. American aero-engine major Pratt and Whitney and French Snecma are competing for the tenders.
The mobile vehicle-mounted passive air space surveillance system is designed to use 'angle-of-arrival triangulation technique' using signals from hostile airborne, ground-based and naval radars, transponders, data link and pulse emitters to detect incoming targets.
Once assembled, the system would give countrywide radar coverage through setting up of 12 such surveillance systems for defending static as well as mobile strategic installations and would be deployed by the Army as well as the Air Force.
The system is also designed for real time exchange of operational information between Army headquarters and Army commands and is also aimed at developing linkages among the strategic, operational and tactical levels in a war.
Cabinet Committee on Security recently accorded a one- year extension for the key project, which now is scheduled to be operational by October next year.
The project earlier this year ran into another mishap, when Electronic Corporation of India, which was the prime production agency, was found to have contracted supply of some sub-systems through a blacklisted private concern.
The Defence Ministry had to intervene to cease supply of these sub-systems and make alternative arrangements.
Another Israeli firm IAI has also been made a co-collaborator in the DRDO's revived prestigious project to develop an indigenous mini airborne early warning and control system.
IAI Elta system is supplying ground based and airborne active phased array radars for the system aimed at undertaking detection of ballistic and cruise missiles.
