Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) : News and Updates

No, they can't. it's just R&D labs. There are no profit or loss statements here. Some areas like this and ISRO will remain fully under state. Like DARPA and NASA
You are right but we should have time bound goals. I know its R&D which is a continuous process but we need some accountability.
Long time back during engineering few ppl from our class did project in CAIR (Centre for Artificial Intelligence & Robotics), it was on firewall nothing earth shattering. But guess when it came to project delivery & demoing they just submitted just the requirements. Why bcos it was confidential! No one has any idea what they did , all we heard was that it was a cool place where ppl come in morning with lnch box , have their lnch in afternoon and leave the office at evening. No one bothered them.

That is organisational reform. Deciding what to work on and not to. When industry matures auromaticallly there is no need for DRDO to it.
Industry will mature & grow capability only when it is given to them. Why would they even invest when nothing is coming to them?
It is a chicken & egg problem. All that DRDO wants to do is spoon feed them even the technologies that are openly available outside the country. We should simply go for open tender only when no one can do it should DRDO step in. Only issue is most ppl will argue that confidential technologies affecting national security needs more protection.
 

In line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's directives, the government has merged two DRDO laboratories to create a new one to do focused research on terrain and avalanches along the borders with China and Pakistan.

"The Defence Research and Development Organisation [DRDO] has created a new laboratory named Defence Geo Informatics Research Establishment by merging two exiting labs. The new lab will focus on research on terrain and avalanches along the border with China from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh," government sources told India Today TV.

The merger would help in bringing together the capabilities and resources of the two labs which will now be working with the same mission statement.

The two new labs merged by the government are the Manali-headquartered Snow and Avalanche Studies Establishment (SASE) and the Delhi-based Defence Terrain Research Establishment.

The merger of these labs is the first step in the large scale reforms to be taken in the DRDO by its chief Dr G Satheesh Reddy, with an aim to make the organisation more lean and mean and more result-oriented.

The SASE has been very actively engaged in the study of snow and avalanches in the operational areas. It has prepared an avalanche atlas of almost 3,000 on-road locations in different parts of the country where the armed forces are deployed.

Similarly, the DTRL had been working on different terrains where the armed forces are deployed.

Sources said that the new lab will also be spreading out its teams in different parts of the border with China like Arunachal Pradesh and work with the forces deployed there.

The merger of two labs happened soon after PM Narendra Modi took a detailed review meeting on the DRDO with all the stakeholders, including his ministerial colleagues, DRDO chairman and Chief of Defence Staff Gen Bipin Rawat.

DRDO chief Satheesh Reddy has also been given a tenure extension by the government and he has been entrusted with the task of bringing reforms in the premier defence research agency.

The DRDO chief recently set up a committee under IIT Delhi, Director P Ramagopal Rao, to review the charter of duties of the laboratories to prepare the armed forces for futuristic battlefields.
 
any idea what is this LIDAR project and space borne instrument. @Gautam
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LiDAR based Spectroscopy & Interferometry has been actively studied for a while. A range of instruments have been made so far; both airborne & spaceborne. We are now into the largest & by far the most tedious part of the project. Creating a database.

LiDAR technology allows the user to discern the elemental & chemical composition of a material(say gas cloud) from thousands of km away. This would allow us to attain early warning capability to the use of CBRN agents in the battlefield. Obviously there would be benefits to civilians too. For example LiDAR interferometry is an accurate way of predicting when & where a cyclone will make landfall.

As with all long range detection systems there is a lot of environmental clutter that we need to deal with. That's why having a database of the ambient atmosphere near a certain place is important. The database allows us to sweep out a lot of the environmental clutter from the LiDAR image of that location.
 
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It will be great if DRDO markets this IP to private players and makes some good revenue out of it. Frankly these kind of stuff should have been done by private players but most of our companies only go for risk free service/body shopping projects.
 
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It will be great if DRDO markets this IP to private players and makes some good revenue out of it. Frankly these kind of stuff should have been done by private players but most of our companies only go for risk free service/body shopping projects.
Indian pvt players are minions compares to Global players like Apple, Google,Microsoft , IBM and LM,Boeing, Northrop Grumen, Dassault etc who actually do path breaking research and invent things and are almost 100 years old and have access to huge funds (both internal and Govt grants)

Its foolish to expect Indian newcomers to invest in such resource intensive path breaking projects.
Its mostly done by Govt funded labs like DARPA and NASA even in USA
 
Indian pvt players are minions compares to Global players like Apple, Google,Microsoft , IBM and LM,Boeing, Northrop Grumen, Dassault etc who actually do path breaking research and invent things and are almost 100 years old and have access to huge funds (both internal and Govt grants)

Its foolish to expect Indian newcomers to invest in such resource intensive path breaking projects.
Its mostly done by Govt funded labs like DARPA and NASA even in USA
I agree for most of the projects which currently dont have any path to commercialization govt should step in and invest. But for others private sector should take the lead especially in software industry. The companies that you pointed out google and microsoft were not supported by govt initially to start with. But infosys, wipro, TCS have been there for a quite a long period of time, its only that they are still stuck to the shitty service sector instead of moving to product domain or take on challenging projects. They make enough money that can be plowed into R&D , they are simply becoming another ambani in software industry.

By the way intel and TCS were both founded in 1968, not to deny that intel got some serious backing from US govt but post liberalization TCS should have grown to be more innovative or path breaking company that simply has not happened.

Look every other sector you need strength in hardware but software industry is one where we could have done better bcos it is more of a human resource intensive. Our ability to create, collaborate , co-ordinate or lead to build orgs/institutions or initiatives is still a big suspect. We will simply remain a mid level country without realizing our potential.
 
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