India is now deploying UAS and light observation helicopters along the borders with China to keep the stepped-up activities of People’s Liberation Army under surveillance.
The construction of over 5,500 “permanent defences and bunkers” along the borders is now being speeded up to ensure their completion within four to five years, under the $2Billion (Rs 9,243 crore) military infrastructure development project approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security for the Eastern Army Command.
“Sukhoi-30MKI fighters are already being based in IAF airbases like Tezpur and Chabua. Army Aviation bases in Assam are also now being upgraded, with seven helicopters and four IAI Searcher-II UAS already been deployed there,” a defence ministry source said.
Though quite belated, all these plans are meant to strategically counter China’s massive build-up of military infrastructure all along the 4,057-km Line of Actual Control (LAC) over the last two decades. A flurry of high-level meetings in the last two-three months, which included a top military briefing to PM Manmohan Singh, have dealt on the dire need to boost India’s military infrastructure, strike capabilities and operational logistics along the LAC.
Incidentally, with five fully-operational airbases, an extensive rail network and over 58,000-km of roads in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), China can now move more than 30 divisions (each with over 15,000 soldiers) at their “launch pads” on LAC in double-quick time, outnumbering Indian forces by at least three-is-to-one. China’s rapidly-expanding footprint in infrastructure projects in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, in the backdrop of the Beijing-Islamabad military nexus which targets India, has served to further heighten concerns in the defence establishment here.
India’s counter-moves, however, are anything but swift. Only 15 of the 73 all-weather roads earmarked for construction along the unresolved LAC, for instance, are actually ready till now.
Source: The Times of India