Start-ups to help it in this endeavour

HYDERABAD: BDL has started undertaking development of next generation weapons systems for the Armed forces with Artificial Intelligence technologies with active participation of start-ups. This is in view of the rapid strides being made by countries across the globe in this arena, said chairman and MD Commodore Siddharth Mishra (Retd.) on Friday.

The defence ministry public sector giant is also setting up new manufacturing units in its Kanchanbagh premises here such as ‘Seeker Facility Centre’, ‘Warhead Production Facility’ and ‘High Temperature Carbon Composite manufacturing facility’.

The Konkurs Missile test equipment and Konkurs Launcher test equipment have been developed in-house as an indigenous substitute to the foreign equipment imported earlier by the Indian Army to make the country ‘Atmanirbhar’ in defence, he told the visiting the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence led by Jual Oram.

The committee’s visit is to study ‘Modernisation of defence public sector undertakings’ and it was apprised about the current product range, manufacturing facilities and modernisation initiatives being undertaken by the firm like the other futuristic technologies of Industry 4.0, Robotics and so on, to supply advanced weapons for the Armed forces.

Mr. Mishra explained about the indigenisation efforts being made for products currently being manufactured under collaboration with foreign countries as the MPs team visited the in-house R&D and manufacturing facilities of Akash and Medium Range Surface to Air Missile divisions. Start-ups and medium, small and micro enterprises too are being supported to work in this direction.

Indigenisation of a few components and sub-assemblies of anti-tank guided missiles and underwater weapons has been successfully completed, he said.