The aim was to bring together the users, designers and defence production agencies and evolve an action plan for adoption of COTS in the defence sector. The seminar also aimed to channelise the thoughts and help adopt a ‘Unified Indian Defence COTS philosophy’ focusing on electronic items encompassing avonics, mission critical air-borne systems, maintenance, codification and selection of qualified manufacturers list.

    The idea behind adopting COTS technology, is to encourage industrial grade component manufacturing agencies to gear up production of components that are suitable for defence equipment. This approach augurs well with the recent Government decision to open up Defence sector to private players. Moreover, COTS philosophy aims at the Government initiative to maximize utilization of private sector in Defence.

    The concept of COTS technology is gaining popularity throughout the world and more so in India. COTS technology covers all the purchases of the Ministry of Defence. The items range from commodities such as clothing, boots, nuts and bolts to sophisticated, critical and highly complex integrated circuits.

    COTS technology in the Indian sector can be useful in two ways- to attain self-reliance through indigenisation and to cut down costs, thereby saving foreign exchange as majority of the items are imported.

    As most weapon systems come from Russia/Western countries, our nation has to incur considerable costs in maintenance and stocking of life cycle spares.

    The critical and complex components that go into the weapon systems have to satisfy a very high degree of quality and reliability. To ensure this aspect, military (MIL) standards have been formulated to meet the stringent requirements of defence.

    A vast majority of purchases within MOD are basic, standard, commercially available components, which serve the performance even if they are replaced by commercial ones. The decision to changeover or encourage COTS is aimed at moving the Defence procurement process away from the strict military specification systems which add to unnecessary costs. With the qualified manufacturers list from the private sector, we can become self-reliant.

    In areas such as avionics and mission critical related Defence equipment, it is difficult to pass COTS products through the Military performance tests. Further, absence of commercial markets for these types of products and the related services in support of them means that there is no directly available COTS products from which MOD can select to the requirement. Logistic practices, part replacement, power consumption, heat dissipation, environmental constraints and electrical emissions are all service related issues which the COTS philosophy has to address.

    The seminar was attended by heads of DRDO laboratories and senior managers of Defence PSUs.