Finally, a new artillery gun for the Army

A few months after clearing critical trials, the Dhanush artillery guns — also called “Desi Bofors” — have entered the production phase to meet Army’s operational gap of field howitzers. The “Make in India” defence manufacturing project took off with the receipt of Bulk Production Clearance (BPC) from the Army for 144 Dhanush guns. Sources said the Ordnance Factories Board (OFB) has already started the production of indigenously manufactured 155 mm/45 calibre artillery gun.
OFB had been waiting for the BPC from the army to start production after Dhanush successfully passed evaluation by the Directorate General of Quality Assurance (DGQA) and the Maintainability Evaluation Trial.

Gun Carriage Factory, Jabalpur plans to supply 6 guns within 6 months, another 12 within 12 months and another 36 guns within 24 months.

This was decided at the OFB’s General Managers’ strategic conference held last month. The decision raises questions about the Army’s plans to get all 144 guns from the OFB within three years.

Dhanush will be the first artillery gun to be acquired by the Army since the purchase of Bofors guns from Sweden in 1980s.

The current order for 144 guns is estimated to be of Rs 1,260 crore, with the Army having an option to acquire up to 414 guns based on operational performance. As per its Field Artillery Rationalisation Plan, Army needs to buy 2,820 artillery guns of various types to replace obsolete guns and equip new units.

Dhanush gun is based on the design and manufacturing technology obtained from Bofors in the 1980s. Under the original Bofors contract, India had obtained Transfer of Technology to manufacture 155mm guns after inducting 410 guns.

The ensuing Bofors corruption scandal, however, hit all such plans till those old schematics were brought out by the OFB in early 2011. OFB claims that the indigenous howitzer is better than the original Swedish gun in range, accuracy, reliability and ‘shoot-and-scoot’ capabilities. Bofors is a 155 mm/39 calibre gun whereas Dhanush is a 155 mm/45 calibre. The enhanced calibre imparts a longer firing range.

OFB is upgrading its manufacturing line for bulk production at Jabalpur Gun Carriage Factory from 2016, wherein it will be able to produce 30-35 guns every year. There are no plans for exporting Dhanush, sources in the OFB said.

Entertainment Weekly

 When I was a young and odd child, one of the oddest things I did was collect Entertainment Weekly. Our family, like so many middle class families, had always had a subscription to Time, and one day Entertainment Weekly began arriving with it. In those early days, it was called entertainment weekly, and in many ways, it resembled many of the entertainment websites (The A.V. Club, Grantland, Vulture) that dominate the field today. There were long, industry-oriented cover stories, buttressed by surprisingly non-banal interviews with stars, producers, directors, musicians, and authors. The second half of the magazine was divided by medium: Movies, Television, Music, Books and Video, each with its own colored tab. Delightful.

I’d read each issue from cover-to-cover, deciding on its predominant “themes,” and record this data in an elaborate database program on my Apple IIe. As a finishing touch, I’d give each issue a “grade,” emulating EW‘s own, then-novel system of affixing a grade to the media products it reviewed.

In my North Idaho town of 30,000, we had three movie screens and I wasn’t allowed to watch cable. But EW‘s approach to media appealed to me in the way that all broad, detail-oriented taxonomies appeal to children: It provided me with a field to master and the tools to do so. Eleven-year-old me was an expert on the Weinsteins, Sundance, and the phenomena of sex, lies, and videotape and The Crying Game—without ever even seeing the movies, or really even knowing what they were about.

The early and mid-90s Entertainment Weekly was a trade magazine for the masses: A publication that promised to make consumers, whether 11 or 45, into near-experts. It took a while to figure out the format—at first, it was a little too snobby New Yorker and not enough Henry Luce-style middlebrow—but by the mid-90s, it had hit its stride.

But doing what its readers liked and doing what its parent company Time Warner needed did not always, or even often, coincide. Entertainment Weekly premiered just about a month after the completion of the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications in 1990, and they were entrusted to convey to stockholders, to industry observers and to the world that the union of two media empires, with two distinct styles of operation and implicit and explicit goals, was, in fact, an act of corporate genius.

Last year, Time Warner announced its intentions to spin off Time Inc.’s 95 “brands,” 23 of which are U.S. magazines, which include Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Entertainment Weekly, but also there is NME, Wallpaper, ESSENCE and both Yachting World and Yachting Monthly. (There are also the 50+ international editions of the main properties.) That was the announcement of the end of 23 years of Time Warner’s flailing attempts to create synergy across its sprawling holdings.

Now Time Inc. is on its own. Last week, for the privilege of being dumped, Time Inc. paid Time Warner the amount of $589,858,212.54—leaving the new company with “cash and equivalents” of just $136 million.

EW‘s rise, scattered identity, brilliant heyday and slow, gradual decline mirrors the same journey of Time Warner’s conglomerate hopes and dreams. The leading magazine company weds a film and television giant? It all looked so great on paper. But here we are with the EW of today, and it’s clear: Just because it looks pretty in a business plan doesn’t mean it’s a good idea at all.