The Defence Minister was speaking at the Annual DRDO Awards function held at DRDO headquarters here today. Speaking to the galaxy of top defence scientists and technologists, he said for decades we have lived with a disturbed neighbour, as a result of which our national security has to be an issue of topmost national priority. Adding further that our preparedness is the best guarantee of peace in this region,
the Minister
said, “over the last five and half decades, undoubtedly DRDO with its high
intellectual talent pool has grown and it has grown into an indigenous
laboratory for the Government and the people of India”. “Where there is
intellectual talent available this has to lead obviously to next step and the
next step has to be that they have to become a hub for defence manufacturing”,
he remarked. “So far we have lived with an error, where we were quite
satisfying partly researching and partly manufacturing ourselves and
substantially relying on equipment from outside. I think that equation is
slowly changing; but this slow pace needs to be expedited and it is an
expedition itself”, he added.
Highlighting the various measures taken
recently by the Government to open the Defence manufacturing sector to private
industry with greater inflow of foreign funds, he said, this new healthy
competition will now make indigenous defence base more competitive and will
make available many new cutting-edge technologies. He also disclosed that
DRDO’s demand for more funds and introduction of performance linked incentives
schemes are under active consideration of the Government.
On this occasion Prime Minister Narendra Modi
presented DRDO Awards 2013 to some outstanding scientists/teams/institutions
for their significant contribution in path breaking research and technology
development in different areas.
In his welcome address, Scientific Advisor to
the Defence Minister and Director General DRDO Avinash Chander gave a brief
presentation on the recent achievements of the Organisation and proposed
initiatives for the future. He threw light on two major initiatives of
DRDO to improve its performance. Firstly activating a cohesive multi-layered
interactive system with Armed Forces, Defence Production and Industry and
secondly by involving students and academia to create a workforce of five to
10,000 students in academic institutions working for defence through Centres of
Technology, which will fuel the technology innovation boom in the country.
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