ON October 3, 2022, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL)’s indigenously-designed and produced Light Combat Helicopter (LCH) was formally inducted into the Indian Air Force in Jodhpur in the presence of the defence minister who named the aircraft ‘Prachanda’ or fearless. “The induction of LCH underlines the fact that just as the country trusts the Indian Air Force, the IAF equally trusts the indigenous equipment,” the minister said.

ONE of the more striking (pardon the pun!) of recent space projects came to the first stage of fruition on  September 26, 2022 when a small spacecraft crashed into an asteroid 11 million kilometers away from Earth. The US National Aeronautics and Space Agency’s (NASA) Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART sought to deliberately hit the small asteroid Dimorphos with the objective of knocking it off its usual trajectory in a technology demonstration that could, someday, be used to actually deflect an asteroid from a collision course with Earth.

INDIA’S first indigenously built aircraft carrier, named INS Vikrant and assigned the same ensign number R-11 as its illustrious predecessor, was commissioned and joined service with the Indian Navy on September 2, 2022 at a ceremony in Kochi in the presence of the prime minister and defence minister. Every Indian must of course be proud of this achievement which, with all the many hurdles it has overcome, has taken 17 long years for fruition, spanning the terms of many governments. The PM, however, appeared to take special credit, especially for the self-reliance embodied in Vikrant.

THE Zaporozhye (also spelt as Zaporizhzhia) Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) has become a focal point in the Ukraine war, as any major nuclear incident there risks the release of radioactivity over a vast area. In such an accident, not only Ukraine but large parts of Europe could face radioactive contamination and much higher rates of cancer and other diseases. Russia has claimed that the Ukrainian side has shelled the Zaporozhye plant in July and in August and has submitted photographic and other documentary evidence to the UN Security Council on August 23, 2022 .

AS the tension between the US and China mounts as a fall-out of Nancy Pelosi's provocative Taiwan visit, the technology war between the two is also taking a new turn. Both houses in the US Congress have approved a $280 billion plan – The Chips and Science Act – to boost US chip manufacturing. Currently, 75 per cent of chip manufacturing in the world takes place in East Asia, centred around Taiwan, South Korea and China. The US aims to re-shore the semiconductor industry back to the US.