The above flowcharts have been officially produced by Rosoboronexport State Corp and Nizhiny Tagil-based Uralvagonzavod JSC and clearly state the obvious. By the way, despite three days of persistent queries sent to the Ministry of Defence's Public Relations Branch, not a single soul has been able to explain exactly why the T-90S MBTs taking part in this year's Republic Day Parade were labelled as 'Bheeshma', while those T-90S MBTs rolled out on August 24 have been labelled as 'Bhishma'. Your guess is as good as mine. In addition, no answers are forthcoming as yet on what exactly is the 'indigenous' content of the HVF-built 'Bhishma', given the fact that both the ERA package and the composite armour panels along with the 12.7mm HMG are being imported off-the-shelf from Uralvagonzavod JSC, while the powerpacks and tracks are being jointly sourced from Russia and Kazakhstan. There also exists another such set of flowcharts comparing the parameters of the OPLOT-M, T-90S and the Arjun Mk1 and needless to say, the conclusions regarding the T-90S are extremely distressing--Prasun K. Sengupta
