The Astra missile being test-fired from Chandipur, Orissa; (above) Policemen look for clues at Central Park in Connaught Place on Sunday. Picture by Rajesh Kumar

New Delhi, Sept. 14: A sleek air-to-air missile was test-fired for the second time in two days today in a demonstration of India’s new military might that is ringing hollow after a series of crude blasts killed unwary innocents in the heart of the capital last evening.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has earmarked about Rs 1,000 crore for developing the Astra BVRAAM (beyond visual range air-to-air missile). At the current rate, it is likely to be inducted at least seven years from now.

No budget has as yet been drawn up for a project to make crude-bomb detectors.

India’s air force has not been in aerial combat — for which the Astra missile is meant — since 1971. Even in the 1999 Kargil war, IAF combat aircraft were operating in the air-to-ground mode and were allowed to do so only from within Indian airspace.

But crude bombs that exploded in Connaught Place and Karol Bagh in Delhi, at Civil Hospital and in Juhapura in Ahmedabad, and at Madiwala and Audugodi in Bangalore are of more recent vintage and are taking a higher toll of Indian lives than the wars for which the military is being prepared.

Forensic examination of bombed sites in Bangalore and Ahmedabad revealed that the explosives were little more than a lethal cocktail of the white ammonium nitrate powder, metal filings and ball-bearings packed tightly into a package that weighed less than six kilograms.

India’s military technology establishment, the DRDO, has now been asked to focus its attention on developing equipment that can detect these elementary devices of terror such as the bombs that tore through Delhi last evening.

The chemical, also sold by about 100 companies in the country as fertiliser, was said to have been used in the devices that devastated busy spaces in Ahmedabad and Bangalore, too.

But the DRDO today is kicked about its latest test of the Astra (Sanskrit/Hindi for weapon) BVRAAM. Only about half-a-dozen countries in the world — Russia and five Nato member countries — have such a capability, said a senior officer.

“We were testing its telemetry capabilities,” said a senior DRDO scientist about the weekend tests. “We were checking its guidance mechanism to see if we can effect mid-course correction after the missile is fired from an aircraft. The experiment is by and large successful,” he said.

The Astra was first tested in 2003 but it was yet to be test-fired from an aircraft, though that was what it was meant for.

The 3.5m-long pencil-shaped weapon is being designed to be attached to the pods of the IAF’s Sukhoi 30 Mki aircraft and the indigenous light combat aircraft Tejas and fired at enemy aircraft that cannot be sighted (“beyond visual range”).

The Astra team is led by the director of the Defence Research and Development Laboratory, Hyderabad, and its project director is S. Gollakota.

Indian security forces in Jammu and Kashmir and the Northeast have been importing jammers to neutralise improvised explosive devices (IEDs) but these would not be of much use in detecting the kind of bombs that are the latest astra in the arsenal of urban terrorists.

“We have been asked by the Union home ministry if we can produce equipment to find such bombs,” a senior DRDO official said today.

A Delhi-based laboratory of the DRDO, the Laser Science and Technology Centre, has taken up a project to use laser beams to detect chemical cocktails that go into the crude explosives from a distance of about 10 metres.

“All over the world many countries are trying to develop similar technology,” the scientist said. In the US, homeland security systems are among the largest area of research in military technology since 9/11.