It is not the lack of industrial capacity, as India can put LCA together, how difficult it would be to build CH-3, CH-4 level of armed drones? It is the lack of the political will and dedication, and the easy access to foreign weaponry that are killing India's own military industries.
No, it is precisely what was said earlier, the inability to convert from design to production. I may design a part using a cast iron piece, but it may not be suitable for mass production or for maintenance, Productionising it may require a re-design to allow production in volume, outside laboratory conditions and without the very tight specifications sometimes used for experimental prototyping. Maintenance may mean the ability to readily access internal parts, networks or wiring, and therefore call for the ability to disassemble an assembly and get behind it. This, along with the sheer lack of mass production; relatively speaking, the degree of industrialisation is very good at the few plants we have, but we have very few plants, compared to, say, China.
So the R&D is superb; the production less than spectacular.
One reason that ISRO does so very well is that they approach every single task as a project by itself, which will re-use some technology, some knowhow, some production, but also develop new things; Indians are good at that, and they have been very successful.
Putting the LCA together from design to prototype together was a class act; I saw it (the end of it) at very close quarters, and the people working on it had reached a natural rhythm, a swing, that was almost impossible to replicate. When it went to production, converting those one-off components that occurred on some parts of the plane was never, ever done properly; as a result, the entire assembly slows down until those difficult parts are built.
