 Welcome to Newsclick. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited has been lately in news for all the wrong reasons. Ministers, officials, Indian Air Force officers have all been thrashing Hindustan Aeronautics Limited for one or the other reason. But the story that has emerged finds one thing very there which is noticeably absent which is that the response of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, its officials or its employees is not finding much space in corporate media. So today we have, we will be talking with Raghunandan, D. Raghunandan, who is a defence expert, happens to be an aeronautics engineer who has had experience of having worked in Hindustan Aeronautics Limited to explain many of the questions that come to our mind when this debate has been raging which has been, I mean which trams Hindustan Aeronautics Limited for a variety of reasons. Welcome Raghun. Raghun, let me ask you as aeronautics engineer, as a former employee of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, how do you respond to all the criticisms that are coming out against HAL and the silence more or less, not the silence but deliberate downplaying of HAL side of the story. Two aspects I'd like to touch on. The first is that all this negative narrative about HAL has come up now against the backdrop of the Rafale deal and is being used I believe deliberately by the government to make a scapegoat of HAL and use that scapegoating to justify their decision to buy 36 fighter aircraft outright from the assault rather than stay with the original contract of buying, of having a deal for 126 fighters of which 18 would have been bought out and 108 would have been made in India in HAL. The new deal now scraps that 108 and goes for outright purchase and the reason being advanced is well HAL's quality is not good, their delivery to time would not have been good, they couldn't agree on guarantee between them and the so they couldn't agree on time scheduling etc etc. I believe this is all scapegoating for reasons which will come to I am sure but to begin with I just want to say that I think in the context of the Rafale deal bringing up these negative things about HAL are to my mind nothing but scapegoating because if the government had felt that in the it's a deal between the government which is the buyer and that's all which is the seller with HAL being a contractor on behalf of the government of India to manufacture 108 aircraft in India. If government had felt that they were deficiencies on the part of HAL would not the government have should not the government have been doing something to rectify those deficiencies if you are now saying we can't rectify those deficiencies shut down HAL what is HAL doing then if you think HAL cannot handle this contract after handling numerous license productions over the past 70 years in India what is HAL doing at all. So to my mind this is a very deliberate attempt at scapegoating HAL and to pave the way for privatization of defense aerospace manufacturing. But Raghu when you have say a retired Air Force officer the stature of Chief Marshal S. Krishnaswamy writing and talking about that the estimated man our rates that HAL quoted for Rafale was 2.7 times that of of or other officers point out that HAL up to 70s did a commendable job but after that some kind of a decline set in. They also point to the fact that more than 1100 aircrafts have crashed once produced by HAL have crashed one of the principle reasons are technical which have to do with the quality of the produce and others by birdheads or human errors. When such allegations and coming from such high authority I mean people who have been born the chief of Indian Air Force what is a common person to make of it. So that was the second part of your question in your introductory remarks which is why is it that the HAL side of the story is not gaining salience. I believe there are two factors involved with this. The story from the HAL point of view who is going to put forward that story. It is either employees of HAL the chairman of HAL has already clarified on many of the issues you have raising but that will be seen in the present context of oh well this is vested interest what else is the chairman of HAL going to say except to defend. There have also been a number of senior Air Force officials who have spoken out on behalf of HAL unfortunately their voice has not gained prominence in the media primarily because I think the idea that Indian public sector undertakings have a poor record are not performing up to the mark has gained credence in recent times. And the idea that private sector should be given a chance to emerge particularly in defense sector has gained enormous traction in the corporate media. However those who know the subject technically would know that the private sector has shown no capacity tendency to acquire that capacity for precision manufacture in almost any industrial manufacturing sector leave alone aerospace. But I will come back to the other question. There have long been grievances expressed by sections of the Indian Air Force regarding performance of HAL in terms of manufacture overall and servicing of aircraft timely deliveries and so on. But two things I think required to be understood. The first is the specific issue that you raised about manners. Yes HAL will take more manners than Dassault to manufacture and if you were to do a comparison you will find that the number of manners taken by Dassault are more than the number of manners taken by Lockheed Martin in the US or Boeing in the US because this is primarily to do with the amount of investment in equipment and machinery that a company brings to bear. Now a large company which huge turnover of manufacture of aircraft like Lockheed Martin or Boeing would invest a lot more would have more advanced equipment and therefore their productivity in manufacture would be that much higher. It is common sense to know that HAL's infrastructure manufacturing capability equipment machinery will not be as advanced as those of France or the UK and even less than that of the United States. Therefore, this is part of the process of learning and acquiring capability of an industry in India compared to industries abroad. No industry in India has started off by being equal productivity to productivity of Britain or Germany or France or the US. Steel companies in India in terms of productivity have not yet reached those levels and are coming close to European levels in terms of energy consumption for example. It has taken us over 60 years to do it and even now many of these technologies are being acquired from abroad rather than being developed from within. It would not be surprising to see this happening in an advanced manufacturing industry like aviation. I will give you an example. I have worked in Rolls-Royce aero engines limited in the UK and as you know Rolls-Royce aero engines outside of the United States is the major aero engine manufacturer in the world. There are not many countries which have that capability even those who make aircraft. In Rolls-Royce I remember way back 40 years ago they had acquired numerically controlled machines to manufacture turbine blades etc. Highly precision manufactured components of aero engines. Rolls-Royce had two of these engines each costing in those days half a million pounds. Pratton Whitney the US competitor had 40 such machines at that time. You can imagine and it was not too long after that that Rolls-Royce in trying to do R&D developing a new model engine actually went bankrupt because it could not sustain heavy expenditure on R&D and heavy expenditure on manufacture and compete with their American counterparts. Just to give you an idea this is not a simple equation to suddenly say HL does not have the productivity of that's all. But surely it doesn't mean that there are no problems with HL. Exactly. So let me come to that. There are problems. I believe HL has over the years developed and not corrected a variety of problems in low productivity, poor quality assurance, poor timekeeping in terms of delivery schedules and overall a weak work culture and not much has been done to rectify this situation. I have been writing about this for over 20 years in fact that we don't have these problems in our atomic energy establishment. We don't have these problems in our space establishment. Why is it that we continue to have this in our defense manufacturing establishment particularly in HL? Because we have not developed the systems which space and atomic energy have which is a tight control over the entire process which is internal development and training and capacity building of human resources and active backing of the political leadership and full support of them. I believe this needed to be developed and you may be aware that in the defense ministry we have got a junior minister for defense. The brief for the junior minister has always been that this junior minister, the minister of state is supposed to be responsible for the defense public sector undertakings. I don't think anybody in the public or in the commentariat or defense analysts and newspapers have asked the question over the past several decades what has this minister of state for defense production been doing? There is no supervision from the political leadership. There is no guidance from the political leadership. There is no discussion about fresh investment plans, improvement in work culture, etc. You are right because they have now told all the public sector, defense public sector units that you have to raise money from the market because the government is not going to fund you. My last question to you for today Raghu is that should one compare the life cycle costs of goods that are bought off the shelf with the price that we will have to pay to build up our indigenous capability. I mean when we buy an aircraft like Rafale. Now the life cycle costs of Rafale that means for 35, 40 years the spares something that we do we take that into account when we are calculating costs and comparing it with the cost of building our own indigenous capability. Again there are two aspects to this. One is you are right one should not be looking purely at rupees and euros in looking at benefits to the nation of having an indigenous capability. You will never have the same control over your armaments if they continue to be imported whatever the stocks you have. Tomorrow if there are conflict situations who is to say whether we will continue to have those spares whether serviceability will continue to be high what will we do in the eventuality of a choking of supplies. These are factors which during conflict go beyond your control and that is when you need them the most and that is why all major countries have their own domestic armaments manufacturing setups rather than being reliant on foreign partners however close they may be. The second part of it is life cycle maintenance and costs are as I said firstly always better served with the indigenous infrastructure and capability and in terms of costs will always pay back in the longer run. The longer you go the more the payback will be. I believe that the current arguments being given in favour of Rafale may or may not be genuine arguments which the government or sections of the Air Force believe. By some means you have to justify this Rafale deal that the government has got it to. So you are looking for reasons and in the course of those reasons you have chosen to catch hold of HAL as the scapegoat and put the blame on them but I believe there is a great disservice being done to the nation. If you follow this logic India ought to be importing all the equipment in the world because this is an argument which middle classes in India have been making for years. Whenever import substitution was talked about when taxation and tariffs were talked about the Indian middle classes always said foreign is better the West is the best. And if in the first decade or two of the 21st century India which aspires to be a world leader continue to sing the same song I think it's a great pity. Thank you Raghu for today. Thank you for watching NewsClick. Please send us your feedback we would appreciate if you do that and keep watching NewsClick.