India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) successfully flight tested the indigenously developed Prahaar surface-to-surface tactical missile, on Sept. 20, 2018.

The test launch was conducted from the Launch Complex-III of the Chandipur Integrated Test Range (ITR) in Balasore district in the state of Odisha.

Range stations and electro-optical (EO) systems tracked the missile throughout its flight. Prahar is a contemporary weapon system capable of carrying multiple types of warheads and neutralizing a wide variety of targets.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman congratulated DRDO, Army, Industries and other team members for the successful mission and said “indigenously developed Prahar will further strengthen our defence capabilities.”

General Bipin Rawat, the Chief of the Army Staff; G. Satheesh Reddy, Secretary of Department of Defence R&D and Chairman of DRDO witnessed the launch and complimented all the team members.

Prahaar

Prahaar (Strike) is an Indian solid-fuel road-mobile tactical ballistic missile developed by the state-owned research agency, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

Prahaar is expected to replace the Prithvi-I short-range ballistic missile in Indian service.

This solid-fueled missile can be launched within 2–3 minutes without any preparation, providing significantly better reaction time than liquid-fueled Prithvi missiles and act as a gap filler in the 150 km (93 mi) range, between the Pinaka Multi Barrel Rocket Launcher (MBRL) and Smerch MBRL in one end and the Prithvi ballistic missiles on the other.

The export variant of the Prahaar system is the Pragati surface-to-surface missile. It was unveiled for the first time by DRDO at ADEX 2013 in Seoul, South Korea. Pragati has a higher range of 170 km and shares 95% of Prahaar’s hardware components.





