Sources also said that the procurement of Milan 2T ATGMs is likely to be the stopgap arrangement before the Army gets its homegrown third-generation ATGM which is undergoing trials. Milan-2 is a French second-generation (ATGM which is produced in India by Bharat Dynamics Limited (BDL) with a range of over 2 kilometres.
India had last year scrapped a programme to buy the Spike ATGM from Israel in view of the indigenous developments in this direction. The DRDO has, so far, conducted two successful trials of the man-portable ATGMs. During the NDA government tenure, several programmes for acquiring weapon systems from foreign vendors have been scrapped in favour of indigenous programmes.
In 2017, a Defence Acquisition Council meeting headed by the then the Defence minister Arun Jaitley had favoured Akash surface to air missile over vendors from Israel and Sweden for supplying Short-Range Surface to Air Missile (SR-SAM) programme worth over Rs 18,000 crore.
Indian Army has a requirement of around 70,000 anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM) of various types and around 850 launchers of different types even as it is looking for third-generation ATGMs with a longer range than that of its existing Milan-2T and Konkurs ATGMs.