India’s Home-Grown Land Mine-Plowing Trawl System Passes Blast Trials

New Delhi (Sputnik) – Marking a major breakthrough in India’s quest to develop local defense technologies, the state-owned Defense Research & Development Organization (DRDO) has successfully designed and developed a land trawl that plows landmines out of the way, creating a safe lane for vehicles such as advancing columns of mechanized forces to drive straight through minefields and into combat zones.

​The Defense Ministry has said that the system would soon be available for user evaluation trials by the Indian Army,which has long been awaiting such a system to meet its operational requirements.

“The trawl system recently crossed a major milestone with the successful completion of blast trials in collaboration with HEMRL Pune, which demonstrated the survivability of the equipment, when subjected to successive series of blast directly underneath it. The fieldable prototype of the trawl system is in the final stage of realization and would be shortly ready for the conduct of user evaluation trials by the Army,” India’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The local development of trawls by DRDO is an important step towards achieving self-reliance in the area of critical military equipment under ‘Make in India’ initiative and would result in foreign currency savings for the country. In 2015, the Indian government had approved the purchase of 120 trawl systems for T-90 & T 72 tanks for approximately $65 million. Once approved by the Indian Army, the trawl system will be manufactured in bulk by the state-owned company BEL with the technological support of DRDO.