CCS clears mega deal for big indigenous artillery guns

NEW DELHI: Big indigenous guns are finally booming. The PM-led cabinet committee on security on Wednesday cleared the around Rs 7,000 crore deal to acquire advanced towed artillery gun systems (

ATAGS

) for the Army, in a major boost for home-grown capability to manufacture such heavy-duty

howitzers

.
The deal is for 307 howitzers, which have a strike range up to 45-48-km, and 327 gun-towing vehicles to arm 15 artillery regiments of the Army, with the contract expected to be inked next week, top sources told TOI.
Designed and developed by DRDO, the 155mm/52-calibre ATAGS will be produced by

Bharat Forge

and

Tata Advanced Systems

. Bharat Forge will manufacture 60% of the guns after it emerged as the L-1 (lowest bidder), while Tata will produce the remaining 40%.
TOI was the first to report that the ATAGS deal would be inked within this fiscal after clearance from the CCS. The orders for ATAGS are likely to go up in the future because the Army plans to induct “more advanced versions” for a total requirement of 1,580 such guns.

India, incidentally, has also secured a couple of export orders for the ATAGs, which officers say have “excellent” accuracy, consistency, mobility, reliability and automation, and can fire five-round bursts as compared to three-round bursts by other contemporary foreign guns.
With ATAGS having an “all-electric drive technology” to ensure maintenance-free reliable operations over longer periods of time, India will be able to export the guns in large numbers in the years ahead, an officer said.
The ATAGS, whose development began in 2013, has undergone a series of protracted field trials over the years. Finally, in 2021-22, the winter trials were successfully completed at high-altitude areas in Sikkim, which were followed by summer user-firing tests at the Pokhran field firing ranges.
The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has again driven home the operational utility of long-range, high-volume firepower. Consequently, the Army is progressively stepping up induction of howitzers, missiles, rocket systems and loiter munitions, as reported by TOI earlier.
In Dec, for instance, the defence ministry inked a Rs 7,629 crore contract with L&T in collaboration with South Korean Hanwha Defence for the procurement of another 100 K-9 Vajra-T self-propelled tracked gun systems, which have a strike range of 28-38 km and can be deployed in high-altitude areas along the frontier with China.
Then in Feb, the MoD inked contracts worth Rs 10,147 crore for high-explosive pre-fragmented extended rockets (45-km range) and area denial munitions (37-km) for the indigenous Pinaka multi-launch artillery rocket systems being inducted by the Army. Pinaka, too, is being exported to other countries.
India has grappled with recurring scandals in import of

artillery guns

, from the Swedish Bofors in the mid-1980s to the South African Denel in 2005 and Singapore Technology Kinetics in 2009, repeatedly derailing the Army's modernization drive.