What have we learnt from our homegrown program:
Cart Before the Horse: Without an engine, there is no credible platform.
Electronic pain: Electronics suite, Radars, OLS, are paramount and unless we develop our own > not just replicate foreign systems.
Hand Carbide diagrams come back to bite: Without metallurgy cooks and those power hungry arc furnaces there wont be any developments in metallurgy. we will keep importing raw material.
Project management and value stream analysis: those pesky Gantt charts, resource allocations and walls filled with sticky notes to reduce cycle times in VSLA's and opex exercises actually work despite the boredom of lead engineers . Without gate reviews and PDP's projects will never keep their time lines.
Airforce can't sit and chillax: the living testament is the Indian Navy, just look at their Directorate of Indigenisation and take a cue out of it.
Throw some money: Billions for russians, french and middleman, peanuts for Indians. Throwing money and people at a problem may not always solve a problem, but surely polar opposite doesn't help either. Hire some decent engineers and managers, reverse the brain drain from MNC's, poach technicians from russia, and for god's sake pay them well.
