Main-battle tank (MBT)

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. You can help by converting these articles into an encyclopaedia-style entry, deleting portions of the kind nor mally not used in encyclopaedia entries. Please also fill in missing details; put categories, headings and sub-headings; and combine this with other articles on exactly the same subject. Readers will be able to edit existing articles and post new articles directly on their online archival encyclopædia only after its formal launch. See examples and a tutorial.

Arjuns do well but Army wants T-90s

Times of India

New Delhi: The Arjuns have done ‘quite well’ in the longawaited battle with the Bhishmas. The Army, however, continues to favour the Bhishmas over the Arjuns in the race for the main-battle tanks (MBTs) for the 1.13-million force.

While the final results of the comparative trials between the indigenous Arjun tanks and Russian-origin T-90S tanks (christened ‘Bhishma’) in the Thar desert are still being ‘tabulated’, sources said Arjuns had performed well on most parameters like cross-country drives and hitting targets on the move. The Army, however, remains certain that its requirement for 1,781 MBTs to replace the older T-55 and T-72 tanks will be met through the progressive induction of 1,657 T-90S tanks and the 124 Arjuns already ordered. It, instead, wants DRDO to concentrate on developing an advanced Mark-II version of the Arjun to suit its futuristic requirements. DRDO, however, wants Army to order a minimum of 500 Arjuns to stabilise production lines and pave way for development of the ‘futuristic’ MBT.

‘‘The decision on the fate of Arjuns and the operational roles in which they can be deployed will only be taken after the final results are compiled and analysed,’’ said an official.

DRDO has often expressed worry over moves to demand ‘higher performance’ from the 58.5-tonne Arjun, which it claims is ‘superior’ to even the 46.5-tonne T-90S in some respects like its ‘excellent weightto-power ratio and very accurate firepower on the move’. With the huge delay in the Arjun project, which was sanctioned as far back as in 1974, the Army was forced to go in for the T-90S to meet its operational requirements.

After getting 310 T-90S tanks for over Rs 3,625 crore under a February 2001 contract, India signed a Rs 4,900 crore deal with Russia in November 2007 to import another 347 of these MBTs.

The Avadi Heavy Vehicles Factory is to manufacture another 1,000 T-90S tanks under licence. Then, there is the ongoing upgradation of 692 T-72 tanks to ‘‘combat-improved Ajeya standards’’.