Some serious in-house introspection and brainstorming is in order. It needs to shed the culture of aping officialdom and the trappings of government. The focus should be on laboratories and workshops. Simultaneously, the DRDO could do well to seek a thorough external audit.

Most of the work currently on the drawing board could be farmed out to the private sector or the defence PSUs. More than half of the current establishment could be slashed. The resources thus generated could be used to focus on core strategic technologies by mobilising the talent needed to conduct such frontier technology research.

An analysis of the comparative achievements of our DRDO with that of other nation’s defence R&D establishments would highlight our dismal performance. It is not that our scientists are not as good or even better than the others. It is just that the system that we have created is not conducive to excellence. We therefore need to change the system, the work ethos and the culture of the DRDO.

The writer was director-general, artillery, during the Kargil conflict