New Delhi: India successfully tested its Pralay quasi-ballistic missile, which is designed for major conventional or non-nuclear strikes against enemy targets up to 500-km away, twice from the Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island off the Odisha coast on Monday and Tuesday.The completion of this Phase-1 flights of the solid-propellant Pralay, which has state-of-the-art guidance and navigation to ensure high precision, paves the way for induction of the missile system into the armed forces in the “near future”, defence ministry officials said.

Pralay, the surface-to-surface tactical missile capable of carrying different types of warheads, will be among the mix of the conventional cruise and ballistic missiles that will be part of the proposed Integrated Rocket Force (IRF), which is currently being planned by the country’s defence establishment. IRF will be separate from the tri-service Strategic Forces Command (SFC) created in 2003 to handle the country’s nuclear arsenal, as reported by TOI earlier.“The Pralay missile equipped with modern technologies will give further technological boost to the armed forces against threats,” defence minister Rajnath Singh said, congratulating those involved in the flight tests on Monday-Tuesday.The tests were carried out as a part of user evaluation trials to validate the missile’s maximum and minimum range capability. The missiles “precisely” followed the intended trajectory, reaching the target point with pin-point accuracy to meet all the test objectives during the trials, which were witnessed by DRDO scientists, Army and IAF officers, and industry representatives, officials said.All subsystems performed as per expectations, which were verified using test data captured by various tracking sensors deployed by the integrated test range, including instruments deployed on a ship positioned near the designated impact point, they added.Conflicts like India’s Operation Sindoor against Pakistan in May as well as others like the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war have underscored the need for long-range precision-strike vectors. “Designed for major conventional strikes with a 1,000-kg payload against enemy targets, Pralay will be an important addition to the armed forces,” an officer said.