India to manufacture 100 Bofors gun indigenously

Finally burying the ghost of Bofors scandal that has haunted successive Congress governments, the Indian Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) has set on a daunting task of manufacturing 100 Bofors artillery guns indigenously from scratch, nearly 24 years after the first of these Swedish guns were inducted into the Indian Army.

The Indian Army has already placed an order with the OFB and the effort if successful will save the country millions and would give the country a capability to further improvise the guns to add punch to its firepower.

Speaking exclusively to me Minister of State for Defence MM Pallam Raju said, "The Indian Army has put a substantial order for 100 of these Bofors guns. It is a huge task for the OFB. If we are successful, it will be a huge technology boost to the Indian defence market.”

The designs are already with the OFB and the Indian Army’s decision to go for 100 guns at the beginning of the project and testing the guns simultaneously as the manufacturing goes on will cut on the time for fructification of the project. Earlier, the Army was contemplating to get the two prototypes of the guns first, then to put them to extensive field trials and then once the designs were validated, the guns would have been put to mass production.

India had got the technology to manufacture the artillery guns after the deal was signed in 1986 to purchase 410 Bofors 155 mm howitzers. However, the controversy that ensued the allegations of kickback that involved the name of the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi sounded epitaph for all the things related to Bofors, despite the Supreme Court not finding any wrongdoing in the deal.

This meant that the OFB had these drawings for more than the two decades but never attempted to make the gun. The Bofors deal also hung around the Army’s neck like the proverbial “Albatross” with all its efforts to procure artillery coming to a naught and its failure to induct a single artillery gun since 1987. After the AB Bofors was blacklisted, South African firm met the same fate in 1997 and the latest Singaporean firm to be blacklisted was Singapore Technology thwarting Indian Army’s attempt to modernize its artillery inventory.