Pokhran-II delayed Tejas project, says former scientist
On July 1 when Tejas, India’s indigenously built Light Combat Aircraft, took off from an IAF facility in Bengaluru, a septuagenarian scientist sitting thousands of miles away in the north Bihar district of Darbhanga was smiling with pride.
Manas Bihari Verma, a former scientist and a close friend of former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, was a part of the Tejas project from its “incubation to project definition phase.” He retired as the Programme Director of the Tejas LCA project from the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA), Bengaluru, in 2005.
Talking to The Hindu on Monday, Dr. Verma recalled the initial hiccups in the ambitious project and the reasons why it took so long — 33 years — for them to “Make in India.”
“It was Pokhran-II nuclear test in May 1998 which delayed the Light Combat Air-craft (LCA) Tejas project, as the U.S., Germany and other countries put an immediate embargo on import of about 50 critical components for the aircraft,” said Dr. Verma. “Later we produced all these components indigenously to make Tejas a fully indigenous fighter aircraft,” he added.
The design of Tejas needed approximately 290 components. “Altogether 700 engineers from DRDO, ADA, HAL, ISRO, NSSL and IIT were involved in the project. The strength was later reduced to 400 due to “cost-cutting,” said Dr. Verma, under whom 200 engineers from ADA worked day and night.
Now settled at his sister’s house in Laheriasarai, Darbhanga, Dr. Verma spends his time interacting with students and “popularising science” in different government schools in north Bihar.
His room on the first floor gives a glimpse of the simple life the bachelor-scientist believes in practising. A desktop computer, some neatly arranged papers, a tabletop calendar displaying different Tejas aircraft, and books — A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Concepts of Physics by H.C. Verma and Charu Chandralekha by Hindi writer Hazari Prasad Dwivedi — are his prized possessions kept on a wooden table in the room. A wall calendar hung opposite his chair displays bigger pictures of Tejas, a happy memory for Dr. Verma.
“Tejas took as much time as any other LCA being built by an advanced country would take to fly in the sky. In 1994, the project got the go-ahead from the government and on January 4, 2001, it took its first test sortie. Any developed country needs seven years to complete such projects.
“But, yes, it should have been inducted into the Air Force by 2008-09. What went wrong I cannot say. There may be some obscurantist forces who wanted to delay the project to import some foreign aircraft,” he said.
A milestone
Dr. Verma said Tejas could prove a milestone in India’s defence system. “Tejas cannot be outdated, but updated like other advanced fighter planes such as F-16s. From its design to fabrication of structure to software to ground test rigs, all are cent per cent indigenous,” he said.
On how Tejas was named, Dr. Verma said: “Our team had sent a list of probable names for the LCA, but the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, named it Tejas — a word that appears in the Bhagawad Gita some 25-30 times — in May 2003. It was perfect for our aircraft.”
On future projects, the scientist said, “Make in India has always been in the country, but what we need is design.”
After retirement, Dr. Verma, on the advice of Mr. Kalam, got engaged in an NGO — Agastya International Foundation — while co-coordinating another one — Biksit Bharat Foundation — for popularising science in government schools through Mobile Science Laboratory vans.
