Dhanush: India’s first indigenous long-range artillery gun clears final pre-induction test
09 Jun 2018
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Dhanush, India’s first indigenous, long-range artillery gun has passed its final test prior to its induction in the Army.
Fifty rounds were fired from each of the six Dhanush guns in a battrery formation (all guns simultaneously concentrating on a single target between 2 and 6 June.
Dhanush is a 155mm x 45mm calibre artillery gun and is also called the “the Indian Bofors”.
The gun has been developed by the Ordnance Factory Board (OFB), Kolkata, after going through design documents running into over 12,000 pages. These documents were given to India as part of the first phase of “Transfer of Technology” (ToT) under the Bofors gun deal inked in the late 1980s.
It has been manufactured by the Jabalpur-based Gun Carriage Factory (GCF), with each 155-mm gun costing about Rs14.50 crore. Each shell costs Rs1 lakh. The first prototype of Dhanush was made in 2014, followed by another 11, which fired 4,200 rounds.
The gun was operated under severe cold conditions in Sikkim and Leh and in hot and humid weather in Balasore, Odisha, Babina in Jhansi and in the desert of Pokhran in Rajasthan.
During the trial in Pokhran a year ago, the muzzle and barrel of the howitzer exploded twice. A probe by defence ministry departkments into the two incidents, however, did not fault the gun.
According to reports, Dhanush is among the finest artillery guns in terms of accuracy. It has a strike range of 38 kilometres and 81 per cent of its components are indigenously sourced, which will be scaled up to 90 per cent by 2019.
To start with 12 guns will be supplied to the Indian Army in the current financial year, out 114 guns in the initial phase. A total of 414 Dhanush guns will be supplied to the Army. Besides features like electronic gun-laying and sighting systems, the indigenous gun’s strike range is 11 km higher than the imported Bofors guns.
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