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NEW DELHI April 18 (AFP) - India's military research industry is on the threshold of launching experiments with yoga to sharpen the skills of troops in modern warfare and help cope with the stress of battling domestic insurgencies.

Scientists are also tinkering with exotic herbs in search of potions to drive away altitude sickness and frostbite and say they have concocted a new chemistry that can block out artillery-induced deafness in the ranks.

Journalists for the first time were taken on a tour Wednesday of one of the military's top research facilities -- the Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences -- set up after 1962 when Indian troops were badly mauled in a border battle with China.

"We lost the war with the Chinese because we were not prepared for high-altitude warfare," said R.V. Swamy, chief controller of India's Defence Research and Development Organisation, an umbrella organisation for 51 military laboratories.

Besides yoga and novel cures for mountain aliments, the institute is also on the verge of patenting a water-cooled combat suit for high-temperature battlefields.

"It is a priority," chief scientist W. Selvamurthy said.

Thousands of Indian troops are currently deployed on the border with Pakistan where temperatures in the summer can rise to as high as 60 degrees celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit).

Selvamurthy said research into yoga had shown the ancient discipline to be more effective than routine physical exercises as it could be practiced on a glacier, in the confines of submarines or even a battle tank.

"Yoga reduces wear and tear of the heart and on our objective scientific scales we have seen it produce mental tranquility, greater alertness, flexibility and enhanced tolerance to cold."

Experiments so far have been conducted on batches of 60 volunteers.

"Our objective is the soldier's survivability, efficiency and increasing his kill-power and the spin-offs can also benefit the civilian sector," he said.

Lieutenant Colonel G. Hemashree, an expert in extreme cold conditions, said she was planning a fusion of yoga with her classified research at the New Delhi facility to find new ways to fight hypothermia.

"Very soon we will ask yoga volunteers in this specially-cooled chamber and map their physiological changes in minus 20 degrees Celsius," she said from inside a giant steel vault.

Every year, hypothermia kills more than 200 Indian soldiers and five out of every 1,000 are hospitalised with life threatening high-altitude sicknesses.

Most of the victims are among army units deployed on the strategic Siachen glacier that straddles the Indo-Pakistan border at an altitude of 21,000 feet (6,363 metres).

Similar casualties occur in the desert heat of northern India or in the tropical marshes of the country's strife-torn northeast.

Director Selvamurthy said his scientists were experimenting with a variety of herbs including Korean ginseng to concoct a potion to sharpen the efficiency of India's 1.3-million army which has fought three wars with Pakistan since 1947.

"We are on an exciting threshold," he said, adding that initial tests with rats had led to trials on a group of 200 soldiers and more recently the herbal potion was given to 4,000 combat troops.

"Very soon the experiment will be large-scale," he added.

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Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
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