Eye on China, Pakistan: India plans major battlefield upgrade for ageing T-72 tanks

The Indian Army archetypal inducted the T-72 vessel successful 1978. At the time, the vessel was possibly the astir precocious armoured warring conveyance successful the world. It was equipped with a almighty 125 mm gun, featured blase fire-control systems, had a precise debased silhouette that made it hard to target, and offered a favourable power-to-weight ratio.

The T-72 gave the Indian Army a important borderline implicit its adversaries erstwhile it was archetypal inducted.In the West, Pakistan was phasing retired its Patton tanks and inducting derivatives of the Chinese Type-59, followed aboriginal by the Type-69 and Type-85 tanks, arsenic good arsenic astir 300 T-80 tanks acquired from Ukraine.However, modern Western tanks inducted successful the 1980s proved to beryllium much than a lucifer for the T-72 during the archetypal Gulf War successful 1991. Western tanks, equipped with superior sighting systems — peculiarly thermal imagers and night-vision devices, on with precocious fire-control systems, shifted the equilibrium decisively successful favour of the Western coalition.

The Indian Army, meanwhile, moved connected to get the much modern T-90 tanks, which are based connected the T-72 platform. The Army archetypal inducted these tanks successful 2001, with the archetypal batch of 124 tanks manufactured successful Russia. Just past week, Armoured Vehicles Nigam Limited (AVNL), located successful Avadi, Tamil Nadu, delivered the 1,000th T-90 vessel to the Indian Army.The Indian Army’s archetypal large effort astatine modernising the T-72 was called Project Rhino, aimed astatine upgrading the vessel to modern battlefield standards. Under the programme, the tanks are to person caller engines, precocious fire-control systems, improved extortion systems, and could adjacent beryllium converted into unmanned combat platforms nether the Aditi 4.0 situation initiative. These measures are intended to widen the work beingness of the T-72 good beyond 2030 portion preparing the crushed for the eventual induction of the Future Ready Combat Vehicle.