Frontier India - News, Analysis, Opinion

Synergy needed beteeen Armed Forces and DRDO

In reference to Admiral (Retd) Arun Prakash’s article ‘What the Armed Forces Expect from DRDO?’, which is an excerpt from his book ‘From the Crow’s Nest’, published in Indian Defence Review. Such prudent suggestions about making DRDO more relevant to the services could have come only from Admiral (Retd) Arun Prakash who perched high in [...]

India’s best known Spy Master Maloy Krishna Dhar Passes away

New Delhi: Maloy krishna Dhar, one of India’s best known spies died in hospital on 19th May 2012. A man whose childhood memory was being huddled in a train with his mother escaping bloody Partition riots without much to his name, and then rose to become a senior IPS officer who never once compromised his [...]

Emergence of Strategic Collaboration – A Thought Experiment

I was to catch a flight from Delhi airport on a lazy Sunday morning. I was going back to Bangalore. At Delhi airport, there were four counters for checking in. Also there were three more early morning flights going to Chennai, Kolkata, and Mumbai besides the flight to Bangalore. Usually one can check-in any of [...]

Standard & Transparent Pricing essential for Diamond Buyers

The fast growing diamond industry in India is still much unorganized and is highly fragmented. To add to the chaos, the industry does not have a transparent pricing system in the market. This has resulted in the end consumer being subject to confusion & deception by different prices quoted by different suppliers. To resolve the [...]

Is Innovation Artificial?

In the preface to the second edition of now classic, The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert A. Simon, the Noble winning MIT professor says, “…artificiality is interesting principally when it concerns complex systems that live in complex environments. The topics of artificiality and complexity are inextricably interwoven…”. When we talk about Innovation we are taking [...]

Indian UAV Engine development programs

India has developed indigenous UAV engines for unmanned aerial targeting system UAV Lakshya and UAV Nishant. A jet engine PTAE-7 has been developed as a sustainer engine for Lakshya. A rotary engine is under development for Nishant. PTAE-7 engine, developed by HAL Engine Test Bed Research & Development Center (ETBR&DC) is a single rotor engine [...]

Innovation Algorithm – The Co-Crafting Way

What is an Innovation Co-crafter? An Innovation Co-Crafter is a Simpleton, Scientist and Saint – who starts along with people in a system (experienced domain experts) to reach to the SOUL of the system. He starts every time as a simpleton – then he becomes a scientist and finally achieves sainthood – reaching and delivering [...]

Network Centric Warfare – Architectural Options

More is not same PW Anderson in his classic paper titled “More is Different” (Anderson, P.W., More is Different, Science, Vol. 177, No. 4047, Aug. 4, 1972, pp. 393-396) stated “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe”. He further [...]

Educating with a difference

At the time of India’s independence, a mere fourteen percent of the population was literate. Only one child out of three had been enrolled in primary school. India has come a long way from there. Today its effective literacy rate is 74.04% (Census 2011 data). It took 65 years for the Union Government, the states [...]

My experiences at DRDO

I consider 1990 as the earth-shattering year on planet Earth (no pun-intended). The world was about to change – permanently some may argue. One of the world’s two super powers, USSR and an established alternative form of governance, the communism, was about to lose traction. The cold war was about to end. Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika [...]