Fury and Grace

By Niranjan Mudholkar,

Added 10 October 2014

Indigenisation, capacity building for larger production, meeting the production orders ahead of schedule and ensuring different variants of the flagship missile is what Sudhir Kumar Mishra, the MD & CEO of BrahMos Aerospace, wants to achieve during his tenure.

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Supply chain excellence
BrahMos is an excellent example of collaborative excellence in a supply chain. It has led to the establishment of a robust Missile Industrial Complex (MIC) in both India and Russia.

The MIC is a conglomeration of public and private sector defence firms in both the countries that have been actively involved in developing, producing and supplying various critical systems and sub-systems for the weapon. As already mentioned, there are over 200 companies (205 to be precise) as part of this supply chain at present from India.

"Since the demand for BrahMos is quite high, with present orders for it worth over thousands of crores, it is our topmost priority to meet the delivery timelines and ensure users' satisfaction. And in order to meet our deadlines, we need to systematically manage our supply chain. One focus area here is full capacity building, to ensure production of the entire BrahMos system in both the countries. Being JV partners, our goal is to ensure that both countries should be able to produce 100 percent of the missile in India as well as Russia."

This means, all the associated partners should produce and supply the necessary components ensuring interchangeablity by following common standards, which will ensure meeting the user requirements. "This will not only double up our scale of production, but would also enable us to meet any immediate or future large-scale requirements."

Readying for the skies
At present, the BrahMos Missile can be launched from land and water. Work is in progress to make it deployable by the Air Force as well. "We are hopeful that the first flight trial of BRAHMOS-A from the Su-30MKI will take place by early next year. BrahMos Aerospace is closely coordinating with HAL, the Indian Air Force and our Russian partners to ensure that the maiden trial of the BrahMos air-launched version takes place at the earliest as deliveries are to be commenced from 2016," Mishra says.

BrahMos Aerospace is also planning to develop a ‘mini' version of the missile and the organisation is currently doing a feasibility study for the new revolutionary weapon. The primary features of the new missile would be that it will be lighter, smaller, more agile, highly lethal and more precise over its predecessor.

It will have a top speed of Mach 3.5. The weapon will carry a similar payload and will have the same range like its predecessor. "However, BrahMos-Mini will be around six metres in size. Our main purpose of developing BrahMos-Mini is to ensure that it is deployed on a larger number of military platforms.

In particular, torpedo tubes of submarines and fighter aircraft like SU-30 MKI, MiG-29 and FGFA. We have just initiated work on the new project and it will take around three years to design, develop and validate this miniature variant of BrahMos." As of now, BrahMos Aerospace has set the date for the year 2017-2018 by which time the new missile would be inducted into our armed forces.

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