NEW DELHI: The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Monday extended the tenure of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) chief Samir V Kamat by a year.

According to the government order, Kamat, who was appointed to the top DRDO post on August 26, 2022, will continue in the position till May 31, 2025, following a defence ministry proposal.

The development comes at a time when the government is going ahead with implementing the recommendations made by a nine-member panel to restructure the organisation to improve its functioning.

The panel, headed by former principal scientific advisor to the government K VijayRaghavan, was set up last year. It submitted its recommendations to overhaul DRDO in January 2024. Kamat heading an internal committee to implement the recommendations by the VijayRaghavan-led panel to make the organisation leaner and more efficient.

High-priority military projects taken up by DRDO have been riddled with a raft of problems including time and cost overruns, irregular closure, and have even been declared successful despite non-achievement of key objectives, the national auditor said in a report in 2022.

Some of these ‘mission mode’ projects were declared successful by DRDO but were taken up again as new ones to realise the unachieved objectives of the projects closed earlier, the Comptroller and Auditor General said in the report.

‘Mission mode’ projects refer to high-priority DRDO projects based on specific user requirements with a fixed deadline for their completion, and pivot on technologies already available, proven and accessible within India or from abroad at short notice.

As first reported by HT, the terms of reference of the VijayRaghavan committee included restructuring and redefining the role of the department of defence (R&D) and DRDO, maximising academia, MSME, and start-up participation in the development of cutting-edge technologies, attracting and retaining quality manpower, utilising the expertise of NRIs/foreign consultants and inter-country collaborations for latest defence technologies, and modernising administrative, personnel and financial systems to achieve speedier implementation of projects.

The development came a day after the government granted a rare extension to army chief General Manoj Pande, days before his retirement on May 31, with the unexpected development deepening the suspense over who will be the next chief of the world’s second-largest army.

Kamat completed his B. Tech (Hons) in metallurgical engineering from IIT Kharagpur in 1985, and PhD in materials science and engineering from the Ohio State University in the US in 1988. He joined DRDO in 1989.

Kamat has steered several critical materials programmes in DRDO. These include the development of high-strength steel for naval ship hulls, high-temperature titanium alloys and nickel-based superalloys for aero engines, tungsten heavy alloys for kinetic energy penetrators, fused silica radomes for missile seekers, armour solutions for personnel as well as combat vehicles, and stealth materials for airborne and naval applications.