Article by Debalina Ghoshal
India’s missile capabilities will elevate to greater scales of technological advancements with indigenous geodetics also dominating their combat capability. In December 2025, India sought to integrate INDIGIS Geographic Information System (GIS) with the 500kms range solid propelled tactical quasi ballistic missile, Pralay. This GIS is developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR.)
This indigenous system would nullify any need for dependency on geodetics capabilities of other countries. This would provide safe and secure method for collecting geospatial data and also probably there will be lesser scope for hacking.
Real time mission and war planning need real time information which is less dependent on foreign assistance. Indigenous technologies not only provide independence in combat operations but also the same during operational readiness. The GIS could also provide “multi-disciplinary intelligence picture” for real time decision makings especially during crises.
While every system is susceptible to hacking with risks of un-authorised data access, malware attacks, and data manipulation, foreign GIS systems could be more vulnerable to hacking than indigenous ones. In the INDIGIS, the centralised map repository provides a robust capability reducing the scope for vulnerabilities. In addition, the pride that India now carries with its technological advancements in defence systems with GIS being indigenously made for missile systems.
There is little doubt that Pralay will become mainstay for conventional deterrence and combat readiness along with BrahMos cruise missile. Hence, focus would be on converting the components of the missile systems into indigenously built capabilities rather than having to rely on foreign countries. This system would provide “a platform for visualisation (2D and 3D) and analysis of digital maps and overlays to carry out operation planning for tri-services.” One advantage of this GIS system would be that they are deployable on any military network, making Pralay a crucial component in network centric operations.
The decentralised publishing and integrated visualisation would provide the missile system to share its geospatial information with other command structures as well, in addition to enhancing the combat efficiency of its own missile system. Offline and online data capability would allow the system to function with and without internet as well as offer greater sychronisation between online activities like cloud processing and access to real time data processing, and offline activities like collection and storage and editing of data. Offline data handling is made possible with the help of air-gapped offline capability oriented technologies like zero data residue and indigenous IP.
Cross border domain capabilities include the capability to sychronise information and data from water, aerial and land and in present times from space. This would strengthen the sensor-to-shooter loop in the holistic network centric warfare framework. The system would also be able to gather crucial data from open sources as well as civilian infrastructures and process the same for military application.
Multiple vector maps with different coordinate systems could become challenging for missile guidance systems to evaluate and interpret. The INDIGIS would enable to resolve this challenge with the help of on-the fly projections, unified spatial referencing and seamless multi-source integration. For missile with short flight time as well as for missiles with supersonic and hypersonic speeds, GIS with capability to handle multiple vector maps with different coordinate systems.
The 2D and 3D visualisation as mentioned earlier is further handled efficiently with the help of horizontal and vertical coordinate systems. This would improve the accuracy of the missile systems by providing the missile system with robust guidance system and flight dynamics. The system is able to support large vectors without crashing thereby improving efficiency of the missile guidance system too and becoming a credible support in network centric warfare where it could share data with multiple command structures.
Centralised map repositories and supported and allowed to remain sovereign with the help of petabyte-scale local geo-database management which handle terabytes to peta-bytes of spatial information and data.
Secure geospatial data will improve the credibility of missile systems, making them lesser prone to vulnerabilities. Both operational and combat readiness would depend on the ability of the missile to launch strikes against designated targets. This would not only depend on the technological advancements in the missile systems and subsystems but also in enabling the missile systems to become secure and non-transparent. This secure geospatial data will be crucial during peace time also as operational readiness could only strengthen when the missile system is capable of collecting data successfully and interpreting and storing the right ones.
Conclusion
In a network centric warfare environment, indigenous systems that are secure and robust would strengthen the network operations between different weapon systems. GIS in weapon systems improve these network operations by providing data secured through centralised systems to command chains of other weapon systems ranging within the three services with the help of decentralised mode of operations in data sharing.
