Chandigarh: India’s pursuit of atmanirbharta, or self-reliance in defence materiel, has been hindered for decades by the persistent tendency of all three services to repeatedly revise qualitative requirements (QRs) for indigenous military platforms and equipment, during both the design and series-production phases.

Industry officials have often noted that frequent – and often significant – late-stage QR changes, particularly by the Indian Army and Indian Air Force, but far less by the Indian Navy, have repeatedly stalled the development and production of indigenous defence equipment and weapons systems.

They describe these “ever-expanding and revised fanciful QR wish-lists” as disruptive, responsible for upending schedules, triggering costly redesigns and forcing developers to race frantically to keep pace with the moving targets of the military.

Even the late defence minister Manohar Parrikar criticised this tendency for frequent QR overhauls and overreach with regards to local materiel manufacture, as well as imports. At a public function in New Delhi in 2015, he stated that the Indian military's equipment QRs seemed straight out of “Marvel comic books” and that the technologies it demanded were  “absurd, unrealistic and simply non-existent” anywhere.

Some years later, India’s first Chief of Defence Staff, the late General Bipin Rawat, similarly criticised the services’ tendency to frame unrealistic and overly ambitious QRs. Speaking at a webinar in May 2020, he argued that India needed “70% solutions” in its defence equipment requirements, rather than endlessly pursuing perfect, cutting-edge specifications which invariably undermined indigenous programmes and delayed inductions.

The CDS further cautioned that “demanding gold-plated QRs” not only pushed projects off schedule but also discouraged the domestic industry, which struggled to cope with constantly shifting benchmarks. His remarks were among the starkest acknowledgements from within India’s military establishment that QR over-extension remained a serious and systemic impediment to achieving genuine atamnirbharta.

Yet most observers, including much of the compliant and often ill-informed media, reflexively blamed delays in platform and equipment delivery, or their shortcomings, on “visible” bodies like the Defence Research and Development Organisation, the defence public sector undertakings, the recently corporatised 40-odd ordnance factories or private industry. In their narrative, every slip or shortfall was instinctively attributed to the collective failings of these high-profile public entities.

What went largely unreported – and often unnoticed – was that the armed forces themselves, quietly but persistently, orchestrated QR changes away from the limelight, and were frequently just as culpable, if not more so, as the developmental and manufacturing agencies for the delays and deficiencies that plagued indigenous materiel projects. Buoyed by a positive public image through carefully orchestrated public relations campaigns, the military largely escaped with these QR missteps, with adverse scrutiny focusing instead on the other, more visible stakeholders.

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“Such scarcely seen but critical interference also created a situation in which the military simultaneously demands the near-impossible from equipment designers, and then critiques delays and shortfalls which, ironically, were rooted in their own shifting requirements,” explained a senior industry official in Bangalore. In effect, the services often ended up creating the very obstacles that compromised the equipment’s development and efficiency – and then faulted everyone else for inherent limitations, he added, requesting anonymity.

Brigadier Rahul Bhonsle (retired) of the New Delhi-based Security Risks consultancy group agreed that constantly shifting QRs – mainly from the Army and Air Force – turned defence planners, research and development teams and domestic industry into ‘moving targets’, forcing them to constantly chase ever-evolving objectives, rendering coherent planning problematic.

He maintained that programmes often commenced with realistic QRs, grounded in existing technological capabilities, only for the military to subsequently revise them – whether to emulate foreign systems, accommodate shifts in service leadership, align with newly articulated operational priorities, or all three.

“These mid-stream escalations routinely left designers and manufacturers struggling to adjust, as once the upgraded benchmarks were imposed, prototypes had to be redesigned, retested and re-certified, extending timelines, inflating costs,” the one-star infantry officer stated. This also deepened friction between the user services and the development agencies, he added.

After decades of reliance on imported materiel, India began seriously promoting indigenous weapons development from the late 1980s – first through the Defence Research and Development Organisation and defence public sector units, and, over a decade later, via private industry – with an obvious dual objective: to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers and to locally develop equipment tailored to India’s unique operational requirements.

To realise this ambition, a structured and complex developmental process was instituted. Under this, the development of an indigenous defence platform or equipment began, with the respective service drafting Preliminary Staff Qualitative Requirements (PSQRs) to address a specific capability gap, in collaboration with the DRDO, private and public sector defence industry entities and other relevant agencies.

Once these PSQRs were finalised, the Ministry of Defence granted them an Acceptance of Necessity clearance, after which the project was assigned to one or more development agencies to build a prototype. During prototype development, the PSQRs were refined and eventually formalised into Staff Qualitative Requirements – SQRs. These, in turn, were reviewed by the Services Equipment Policy Committee, which evaluated the project’s affordability, indigenous content and compatibility with existing systems.

Thereafter, the SQRs were, at least in principle, meant to remain “frozen” throughout the succeeding production cycle, providing designers and manufacturers a stable goalpost to meet within a designated timeline.

But in reality, the services rarely let these parameters remain stationary, and adjustments crept in mid-development, prompted by updated operational priorities, new international benchmarks or simply a change of guard at the top.

Echoing Parrikar’s “Marvel comics” dig and General Rawat’s warning against “gold-plated QRs”, such serial tinkering, industry sources said, upended Indian Army and Indian Air Force projects. And, other than stretching schedules and inflating budgets, they also strained designers and manufacturers alike, transforming otherwise feasible indigenous programmes into prolonged, expensive and over-engineered undertakings.

Three major projects vividly illustrate this trend.

The Tejas Light Combat Aircraft programme, initiated 44 years ago in 1981, remains one of the principal casualties of this persistent QR turbulence, hampered for decades by the Air Force’s continual demand for upgrades to its performance – higher payload, greater endurance and range, new avionics and compatibility with imported weapons.

On a wry, jocular but entirely apposite note, a senior retired Air Force veteran – formerly associated with the Tejas project – once compared the Tejas QRs, demanded by the air force’s Plans and Operations Branch at Air Headquarters, to the composite attributes of past Bollywood heroines.

In his quaint telling, the Indian Air Force’s “throttle-and-stick” test pilots sought in Tejas the timeless beauty of Nutan, the sensuality of Mumtaz, the vibrancy of Vyjayanthimala, the grace of Waheeda Rehman, the dancing agility of Helen and the effortless screen presence of Asha Parekh.

“An ever-evolving wish list was really the heart of it,” he said with a rueful smile. The Indian Air Force kept insisting on change after change, wanting Tejas to do everything – and then a little more, he said, declining to be named. It was like asking a single actor to discharge multiple roles in a Bollywood epic.

The Indian Army’s Arjun Main Battle Tank, initiated in 1974 – seven years before the Tejas programme was launched – offered another stark illustration of unchecked QR inflation.

What began as a straightforward requirement for a modern, survivable indigenous tank to reduce dependence on Soviet T-series platforms steadily ballooned within the Army’s Armoured Directorate into demands for ever-heavier armour, increasingly sophisticated fire-control systems and a growing array of auxiliary subsystems.

Each redesign added weight, and the cumulative effect was a 68.2-tonne behemoth that far exceeded the load-bearing limits of most roads and bridges in Punjab – the very theatre in which it was meant to operate. Deploying it there would have demanded extensive infrastructure replacement or reinforcement at prohibitive cost, effectively rendering the tank impractical in the terrain for which it was originally conceived.

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Even the Indian Navy’s INS Vikrant aircraft carrier was not immune to shifting requirements on sensors, aviation facilities and weapons fit changes that contributed to a five-fold cost escalation and delayed its commissioning by more than six years.

But despite this high-profile stumble, the Indian Navy has long been far less encumbered by the QR problem than the other two services. As one retired three-star officer remarked, the Navy had “slipped its moorings and sailed away”, meaning that once it committed to an indigenous design, it largely resisted the temptation to endlessly tinker with QRs or chase every passing foreign technology trend.

Its 61-year-old Directorate of Naval Design – operating out of a modest house in South Delhi’s Kailash Colony – worked cohesively with designers and shipyards, maintained stable baselines and accepted incremental improvements rather than wholesale redesigns mid-stream.

The outcome was visible, with the Indian Navy having become the most indigenisation-friendly of the three services, backed by long-range planning, faster decision cycles and technically realistic QRs. Chief of the Naval Staff Admiral D.K. Tripathi recently noted that the Navy was inducting a new platform every 40 days or so, as it pushed toward a 200-plus fleet by 2035.

The service had also set its sights on achieving “complete self-reliance” at the component level by 2047. At present, all 52-odd ships on order for the Navy are of indigenous design and are being built in Indian shipyards and, in parallel, another 74 platforms have received Ministry of Defence approval under the same framework.

Space constraints, however, preclude listing further instances of QR revision and mid-stream alterations. But these shifts were not confined to a few problem cases – they spanned helicopters, assault rifles, drones, artillery systems, air-defence missiles, infantry combat vehicles, battlefield radars, electronic warfare suites, naval sonars, torpedoes, infantry soldier-systems, night-vision devices and even basic tactical communications gear.

In sum, almost every category of materiel India has attempted to design or manufacture indigenously in recent years has, in some measure, been touched – and often troubled – by this persistent QR churn.

In recent years, some reforms have attempted to address this problem via schemes like the proposed Integrated Capability Development Plan, to facilitate enhanced interaction between industry and the services and preclude QR changes, but little has come of them.

Industry officials agreed that enforcing QR discipline and stability would necessitate far more than procedural adjustments; it would demand a deeper visceral reset – one that compelled both the armed forces and the defence ecosystem to prioritise realism, continuity and long-term capability development over frequent shifting ambitions.

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