Missile Systems of India: Agni, BrahMos and IGMDP

A missile is a self-propelled weapon that carries a warhead to a target. India's missile effort was pulled together in 1983, when the government approved the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme, the IGMDP, under the Defence Research and Development Organisation. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam led it, and the programme was designed to give the country five missiles at once instead of one at a time. The IGMDP was formally declared complete in 2008, but the families it started are still being extended, and it is those families that General Awareness papers ask about.

How missiles are classified

The first division is by flight path. A ballistic missile is powered only in its early phase and then coasts along a high arc under gravity to its target. A cruise missile flies low within the atmosphere, is powered throughout its flight and can manoeuvre, which is why it is compared to an unmanned aircraft. The second division is by range, from short-range to intercontinental ballistic missiles. The third is by launch platform and target, which gives surface-to-surface, surface-to-air, air-to-air, air-to-surface and submarine-launched missiles. Speed gives a fourth division, into subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic.

The five missiles of the IGMDP

The Agni and Prithvi families

Prithvi-I has a range of about one hundred and fifty kilometres and went to the Army, Prithvi-II reaches about two hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty kilometres and went to the Air Force, and Prithvi-III is the naval version. Dhanush is the ship-launched variant of Prithvi. The Agni family climbs in range: Agni-I about seven hundred kilometres, Agni-II about two thousand, Agni-III beyond three thousand, Agni-IV about four thousand and Agni-V more than five thousand kilometres, which puts it in the intercontinental class. Agni-V is canisterised, which means it is stored and fired from a sealed canister and can be moved by road, and it has been tested with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle technology under the mission named Divyastra. Agni Prime, written Agni-P, is a newer two-stage missile of the one to two thousand kilometre class meant to replace the earliest members of the family.

Cruise missiles and the rest of the arsenal

• BrahMos is a supersonic cruise missile built by a joint venture of India and Russia, and its name joins the Brahmaputra and the Moskva. It flies at close to three times the speed of sound and can be launched from land, ships, submarines and aircraft, the air-launched version going on the Su-30MKI.
• Nirbhay is a long-range subsonic cruise missile powered by a small turbofan engine, able to fly low and loiter over a target area.
• Astra is India's beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile, carried by the Su-30MKI and the Tejas.
• Rudram is an air-launched anti-radiation missile designed to home in on enemy radars.
• The K series is the submarine-launched family: K-15, also called Sagarika, and the longer-ranged K-4, both meant for the Arihant class of nuclear submarines.
• Air defence is layered: Akash and the Quick Reaction Surface-to-Air Missile for shorter ranges, and the Medium Range Surface-to-Air Missile, developed with Israel, for longer ones.
• Helina and Dhruvastra are the helicopter-launched versions of Nag; Prahaar and Pralay are short-range tactical missiles; SMART is a system that uses a missile to carry a torpedo far out to sea.

Where they are made and tested

The missile laboratories of the DRDO are clustered at Hyderabad, where the Defence Research and Development Laboratory, the Research Centre Imarat and the Advanced Systems Laboratory work on guidance, control and propulsion. Production is handled largely by Bharat Dynamics Limited at Hyderabad, with Bharat Electronics Limited supplying radars and electronics. Testing is done at the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur in Odisha and from Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Island off the Odisha coast, which was earlier called Wheeler Island. It was from that island that Mission Shakti, India's anti-satellite missile test, was carried out on 27 March 2019, making India one of the few countries to have demonstrated such a capability.

The Ballistic Missile Defence effort

Alongside offensive missiles, the DRDO has worked on a two-tier ballistic missile defence system. The Prithvi Air Defence interceptor is meant for engagement high above the atmosphere and the Advanced Air Defence interceptor for lower altitudes, so that an incoming missile can be engaged twice. Questions on this part of the syllabus stay at the level of naming the two tiers and the agency behind them, so the detail does not need to go further.