You are right! The problems are mainly in two fields: a. The 'Socialist' mindset ingrained for political mileage over the 60s and 70s which stressed upon developing a welfare state on the lines of Soviet philosophy (by itself a good theoretical idea) without the necessary checks and balance needed for accountability and mating it with the free for all democracy which India has pioneered and now we see US following (disrespect for each other and hardly any values). This ensured large public sector units coming up under state control which enforced job assuredness over performance scaling. This led to minimal incentive to work and rewarded malingering and sheer laziness. Added to it, the policy of importing weapons (which India had no choice but to do) allowed corruption to creep in, with deliberate stalling and delaying to justify purchase of overly expensive tech and machines from foreign OEM and the cycle was followed up even when ToT clauses were introduced. 02 examples for the same are : (i) INSAS: a good weapon which is excellent at ranges and highly accurate. I prefer INSAS to AKMS, VZ-58 or M4A1 (having used all). But the quality that was mass produced was substantially inferior to that which was put up for acceptance. Expensive equipment was imported which drove up the per unit cost of the weapons to more than had India bought license manufacture and look what has come of it. (ii) Bofors FH-77. 500 outright purchase 1000 to be built in TOT. ToT was achieved in 1987. But Ordnance Factory Board kept quiet and political row over it ensured that the knowledge was buried as Army desperately wanted to upgrade and OFB was hoping another outright purchase from foreign vendor (and more kickbacks) till TATA unveiled its wheeled 155 mm gun a couple of years back and OFB (realizing it was about lose the potential contract) came out claiming it had developed the gun finally.
You are absolutely right. Our corruption, laziness and sheer indifference is the reason here.
Due to change in configuration. And anyways LCA is "Long Coming Aircraft" .. so you have to bear with us!
The understatement of the year General