Made In India : Akash Missile Fails Tests, with 30% failuer rate, also not installed

indigenously built Akash, surface-to-air missiles (SAM) that were to be positioned in the vulnerable Siliguri corridor (also referred to as the Chicken’s neck) to take-down incoming Chinese Air Force fighters, have not been installed, the Comptroller Auditor General of India (CAG) has observed.

What is worse, at least 30 per cent of the missiles supplied to the IAF have been found to be faulty.

The stand-off at Doklam in Bhutan between Indian and Chinese troops is a few kilometres away from the Siliguri Corridor. National Security Advisor Ajit Doval met his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi on the sidelines of the BRICS NSAs meeting in Beijing.

The CAG calls the missiles “strategic” and says “the missile systems were to be installed at six designated sites between 2013 and 2015”. But till date, none of the missiles systems have been installed. The CAG report was placed before the Parliament today.

The total cost of the project was about Rs 3,900 crore, out of which the IAF has already paid Rs 3,800 crore.

The IAF was to deploy six Akash missile squadrons east to counter China’s build-up of military infrastructure all along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). China has eight fully-operational airbases in Tibet.

And, that isn’t all. The CAG report says that about 30 per cent of “strategic missiles” made by BEL – a defence public sector unit – failed when they were test-fired. “The larger issue is that 30 per cent failure rate of the sample tested puts a question mark on the reliability, based on which 95 per cent of the payment was already done”, the CAG said.