Indian Army To Buy 186,000 Bulletproof Jackets To Ease Shortage

In response to the shortage of bulletproof jackets, the Indian Government has decided to buy 186,000 of them for the country’s armed force. The jackets are planned to be shipped next year in April.

According to the Press Trust of India, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said that this deal would cost about Rs6.39bn in a reply in Rajya Sabha.

He also stated in the tender for procurement that the MoD would not enforce an embargo on raw material imported from China for bulletproof jackets. However, in this tendering, it is compulsory that 30% of the content must be locally-sourced.

After SMPP, an Indian company changed their suppliers after winning the bid last year, China has become India’s biggest supplier of raw materials for the order of 186,000 bulletproof jackets.

“In 2009, there was a shortage of 353,755 bulletproof jackets in the country, but the procurement was not done for a long time. A request for proposal (RFP) for procurement of 186,138 bulletproof jackets has been issued in April 2016 and the tender in this regard was allotted on 9 April 2018 to an Indian buyer,” said Singh.

So far, the MoD has purchased around 10,000 bulletproof jackets after the DGQA’s quality checks. (DGQA stands for Directorate General of Quality Assurance). By October 2019, 37,000 jackets are expected to be delivered.

As the DGQA tests the quality of every single lot provided by the vendor, Singh added that:

“There is no decline in the quality of bulletproof jackets procured for the Indian Army.”

Apart from these jackets, the Indian army also plans to procure Excalibur guided long-range artillery rounds, which has the ability to precisely assaulting a target located over 50 km away.

This ammunition can be used on the M-777 howitzers from the US.