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India to design ABM on the lines of Star Wars: Kalam

India is trying to design a state-of-the-art Anti-Ballistic Missile system on the lines of the United States' Star Wars project, according to Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, the architect of the Indian missile programme.

While the country's first Light Combat Aircraft will be tested before this month-end, efforts are on to operationalise all the missile systems within two or three years. Agni and Prithvi have already been operationalised.

''The country can pursue an inter-continental ballistic missile programme if adequate funds are made available for the project,'' Dr Abdul Kalam told the plenary session of the 87th Indian Space Congress in New Delhi on Monday evening.

Dr Kalam, who is the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Union government, was sharing the platform with the Indian Space Research Organisation Chairman K Kasturirangan and the Atomic Energy Commission Chairman R Chidambaram at a seminar on 'The Indian strategies of science and technology in the 21st century.'

He said the unmanned supersonic aircraft being developed by ISRO would go a long way in defence application and help save the lives of pilots. Dr Kalam said the future war scenario in the world will be characterised by economic and cyber warfare involving the World Trade Organisation patent regime and the like. He added that Prime Minister Vajpayee's vision of India becoming a developed nation within two decades would be possible only if the country became technologically advanced.

The supersonic plane -- which can carry 15 times the current orbital load -- now being developed by ISRO was a step in that direction. At the same time, he said, the country had to increase its per capita consumption at least ten times by generating more power. The country had to double its nuclear power generation to 40,000 MW even as it was preparing itself for a lunar flight shortly.

The AEC Chairman R Chidambaram said the nuclear option was the only way for meeting indigenous power needs. All the ten nuclear power plants now operational in the country were working with 78 per cent average capacity and had not been affected by the Y2K bug, he added.

Indian industry, he said, was now fully equipped to meet the spare parts requirement of the nuclear programme. The fact that several reactors had undergone a change in their designs over the years proved this.

One of the major achievements of research in the atomic energy department, Dr Chidambaram said, was the development of desalination plants while efforts were underway to develop 'fission-fusion hydridisation to tap more energy.

The ISRO Chairman Kasturirangan talked of futuristic space programmes which included the development of mass transport systems carrying several tonnes of payloads, space tourism, space exploration, and the national information infrastructure combining the entire gamut of satellite systems.

Other areas of research underway included mobile satellite services for fleet monitoring, messaging, datafaxing and voice casting which could be operational within 10 to 15 years.

UNI

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