Since October, the Indian government and military have racked their brains on the issue of winter protection equipment for border soldiers, and they have repeatedly been thankless, because the quality of their products has been criticized by the media. Following the exposure of the "US-made second-hand winter clothing incident", India's "Economic Times" recently reported that the latest batch of sleeping bags delivered by the Indian military to frontline soldiers was actually a "problematic inferior sleeping bag" imported from Italy more than a decade ago. This incident put the Indian government on the cusp again.
According to early reports by Indian media, the Indian government purchased 35,580 sleeping bags from Italy in 2006. However, as soon as these sleeping bags were purchased, the soldiers in charge of the inspection discovered many quality problems. It turns out that these sleeping bags generally cut corners, and the most critical material filled with down did not meet the standard requirements, which also caused the sleeping bags to not keep warm at all. In order to further verify, the Indian military also specially invited experts to conduct quality assessment. The result is no surprise, this batch of inferior sleeping bags cannot be used in high altitude and alpine regions. Seeing that it had suffered a loss, the angered Indian government immediately issued a fine to the Italian supplier, and the Italian company that knew it was at a loss also paid the fine in disgrace.
Many people think that the "Oolong procurement incident" 14 years ago has long since disappeared, and this batch of inferior sleeping bags should have been completely destroyed long ago. Unexpectedly, for some reason, the logistics department of the Indian military kept putting these inferior sleeping bags in the inventory warehouse, and reopened them after a lapse of 14 years. Some military experts believe that this is likely to be a reluctant choice of the Indian government.
As the border situation becomes more and more tense, India continues to increase its military strength, and the number of Indian troops on the northern front has reached 50,000. In order to boost morale and stabilize the people, the Indian government and military have repeatedly stated on the one hand that front-line soldiers have "sufficient weapons, ammunition and materials." The so-called "lack of food and clothing" news reported by foreign media is pure rumors. On the other hand, under the premise that the country does not have production capacity, India also urgently purchases a large amount of cold protection materials from European and American countries. Although India's procurement efforts are very large, there are too many front-line soldiers, and it is obviously a luxury to want to "puff enough food". According to some Indian media reports, as the weather in the border area is getting colder and colder, a large number of frostbite incidents of Indian soldiers have recently occurred. In such a severe situation, the Indian military had to activate the storage warehouse to urgently call the second-hand inferior sleeping bags purchased more than ten years ago.
In fact, this procurement incident 14 years ago was itself closely related to various corruption and fraud incidents. In recent years, India’s foreign military procurement has repeatedly become "taken advantage" due to internal fraud. For example, as early as 2012, India introduced a batch of "Tatra" military trucks from the Czech Republic, and found that they were all second-hand goods at harvest. In 2019, India spent a huge amount of money from the United States in order to build the domestic aircraft carrier "Vikrant". General Dynamics introduced four LM2500 gas turbines and found that the horsepower of each machine had shrunk by 8,000, which was unable to keep the aircraft carrier at a standard speed. Even many large-scale equipment procurement projects are inevitably favoritism, and Indian officials responsible for purchasing cold-proof materials are naturally impunity.
is even more tragic. India, as a large country with a population of 1.3 billion, has been stagnating for a long time in the development of basic military industry even though it has the ambition to develop high-tech equipment such as aircraft carriers. For example, the most basic military anti-cold equipment, India has relied on imports for the past 40 years, and has no intention of investing in the development and manufacturing of local anti-cold equipment. Up to now, the official movement responsible for material procurement in the Indian Ministry of Defense is still running around. According to Indian media, India will continue to purchase cold-proof equipment from the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Australia and other countries in the future. Knowing the current dilemma in India, these countries generally "speak big" and offer asking prices far above normal. Seeing that the weather is getting colder and colder, I don't know when the Indian soldiers will wear these "universal costumes" from thousands of miles away. (Sheva)
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