NEW DELHI - The Indian Army's Tactical Communications System (TCS) - deemed critical to the combat capabilities of the service - continues to suffer from delays. The TCS project is designed to provide the service with a dedicated mobile communications system replete with anti-jamming and electronic countermeasures capabilities. It is also intended to form the communications foundation for the new digital architecture of the Army's nascent Battlefield Management System (BMS).
The Army has hoped to bring the TCS aboard as soon as possible, but instead of quickly moving ahead on a project first conceived in 2000, procedural disputes involving the two development agencies tapped to compete for the program have halted progress.
The first development agency involves a consortium made up of private sector defense companies, including Larsen & Toubro, Tata Power SED, and HCL Ltd. The other involves state-owned Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL). Both have been tasked with each developing a TCS prototype at the cost of $100 million apiece. The government is to finance 80 percent of the costs incurred in the prototype development. Once the systems are developed they will each be evaluated, tested on the ground, and then one of the two will be down-selected for production. The entire process - conducted under the Indian Defense Acquisition Council's "Make in India" procurement category, which requires fully indigenous-sourced content - was expected to take 36 months.
Instead, the private consortium is refusing to proceed with development until it receives equivalent tax incentives provided to BEL, as well as control over the intellectual property rights to the system (owned exclusively by the Army through the Ministry of Defense as per project requirement). As such, little progress has been made towards developing a TCS prototype since the two developing agencies were selected in early 2014.
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