Agni-V success has city scientists on cloud nine

HYDERABAD: With India’s 30-year-old dream coming true on Thursday with the test firing of the 5,000-km range Agni-V missile to proudly enter the exclusive Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) club, defence scientists lost no time in lining up bigger plans.
“We’ve done it… it feels really great. The next step would be to repeat the performance.Now that we have achieved what we wanted to, there are more big plans ahead. In the future, we will be able to have even a longer range missile. We will go by the current trends. We have consolidated our 30-year missile technology, but primarily we have now laid the foundation to achieve something even bigger,” V K Saraswat, DRDO chief and scientific advisor to defence minister, told TOI from Wheeler Island.
Excited as he was with India’s great leap, Saraswat said they had specific and a variety of plans to ride to greater achievement on the success of the Agni-V. Though Saraswat did not commit himself to the `longer range’ plan, sources aver that specific plans have already been put in place, perhaps for a 7,000-km range, by improving the Agni-V. The plans would be forwarded to the government for clearance
“India can do it. We have specifically worked on the Agni-V variant for the last three years and we can build on what we have now achieved to increase the range,” Saraswat said.
Much as Agni-V gives the country reason to rejoice and celebrate, scientists, in specific, at the missile complex in Hyderabad had all the more reason to cheer. At the Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL), Research Centre Imarat (RCI) and Advanced Systems Laboratory (ASL) at Kanchanbagh, there were celebrations everywhere as it is here that the missile was developed. These cluster of laboratories, called the missile complex, have been working on developing the missile with each organization being given a responsibility.
The Agni-V project as such belonged to the Advanced Systems Laboratory. Apart from executing the project, the ASL was responsible for the propulsion system of the missile. In addition, ASL scientists also worked on what is called the `heat shield during the re-entry phase of the missile’. ASL’s R K Gupta is the project leader of the Agni V.
It may be mentioned that the programme director for Agni is Avinash Chander, chief controller of missile. The DRDL on its part had the job of doing the systems study for the missile, the aerodynamics study and was responsible for the structure. The total avionics for the entire missile, which is now the pride of the country, were provided by RCI. Only the missile launcher that was used was made in Pune.
The Research Centre Imarat, which provided avionics for the missile had A P J Abdul Kalam, who later went on to become the President of India, as its founder director. RCI was established to design and develop world-class, state-of-the-art technologies for reliable indigenous weapons systems. “Practically, the entire missile was developed in Hyderabad,” a defence scientist said. In all the three laboratories, it is learnt that the scientists, employees and workforce total nearly 4,000.
According to defence scientists, it was because of the efforts of the missile complex in Hyderabad that it was possible to restrict the weight of the Agni-V to 50 tonnes. “At Wheeler Island, immediately after the Agni-V was test fired successfully, more than 250 scientists from Hyderabad who were also part of the event jumped and danced. That was the atmosphere that prevailed here. And in Hyderabad, I have learnt that posters have been pasted in our laboratories by the thousands of employees and scientists there celebrating the big event. The celebrations will continue,” said Gundra Satheesh Reddy, outstanding scientist and associate director with Research Centre Imarat, Hyderabad.