DRDO Chairman Samir V Kamat with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh

Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) Chairman Dr. Samir V Kamat said that there is an aversion to risk and intolerance of failure in India due to which people end up taking less challenging projects.

Dr. Kamat made the comment in Bengaluru on September 21 while delivering the Air Chief Marshal L.M. Katre Memorial Lecture 2024 on Defence R&D The Road Ahead. “If there is a failure, immediately you get a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report saying that you have caused loss to the government. Questions are raised on who is accountable. That makes people take on less challenging projects.”

Need For Change

Due to this, many projects keep getting extended instead of them being closed. “This has to change. You learn a lot more from your failures than from your success. If you have to fail, fail fast, so that you learn and move on,” he added.

Dr. Kamat said that this attitude is slowly changing as Defence Minister Rajnath Singh recently gave leeway for high-risk projects.

“The Defence Minister has given us this leeway where if you say at the beginning of the project that this is a high-risk project, we will make an attempt, but if it doesn’t happen, we will close the project. This leeway has been given and we hope it will bring a transformation in the ability to develop critical cutting edge technology in the country,” said Dr Kamat, who is also secretary, Department of Defence (R&D).

He also said that India should improve its R&D spending with more investment from the private sector.

“If you look at our R&D spend, India is spending only 0.65 % of our GDP on R&D. Whereas USA spends 2.83 %, China spends 2.14 %, Russia spends 0.98 %, France spends 2.19% and South Korea spends 4.8% of their GDP on R&D. The government is aware of this and there is a clear thinking that in the next four to five years we should move to at least 1% of our GDP on R&D. Hopefully, by 2035, we should rise to 2%,” he said.

AMCA project

On the indigenous fifth generation Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA), the DRDO chief said the first prototype will roll out by 2028, and production is expected to begin by 2034.

The AMCA project got sanction from the Cabinet Committee on Security in March.

Agencies