I don't know the current policy in Drdo ,but they should employ foreign expert along with Indians.Like for assault rifle there are a lot of experienced expert which drdo can employ , use their expertise and knowledge.Just like private companies do.You know foreign expert employed by tata were involved in the development of tata nano.I do not mean Indians don't have brain , what i am implying is that Drdo should harness talent ,brain ,and experience from world over.
Only Indian citizens can apply for posts in DRDO. Foreign consultants are accepted, but they are hired through tenders and represent large companies like EADS.
It's not lack of brains or resources, it is all because of mismanagement. Every work group does their own thing and there is no synergy. This is especially the case in large projects where multiple labs are involved with multiple teams under them.
Do you know what really happens here? Say for example I ask you to make a male connector of 2cm dia, another team may make a female connector of 1cm dia. When both have their products ready and they come to interconnect them, obviously fiasco happens. Naturally, none of them take the blame. Work restarts. This time the first team makes 1cm dia and the other team makes 2cm dia, process repeats until they get it right. I have simplified it, but this is what happens, just imagine on a larger scale with materials and tolerances that takes months to finish.
Recently there was a small explosion in a Bangalore lab that I cannot reveal, and it has delayed a "very important" project by a few months. The reason was because one guy (team) was doing something else and another guy (team) came and tampered with it. They were messing with batteries and boom. Nobody was hurt, but "product" was damaged. Neither side knew what the other side was doing. How will the avionics team know what the FCS team is doing and viceversa? They simply lack the experience to work together.
Lack of experience is another cause for failure. When they are designing an airframe, they can't get the loads right the first or the second time, it is a series of hits and misses. They keep trying different combinations until they get a few right. And just so you know this takes weeks to work on. So, what Boeing may take one month, we may take 10 months to finish. Naturally, this will take time. But if you add this with mismanagement, you can only imagine the delays it will cause. That's what is happening to many projects, not just LCA. A friend of mine worked on the same thing for nine months straight and provided a dozen different loads for the same aircraft.
So, when they give deadlines, they are actually quite flexible and realistic, if they were Boeing. What they cannot take into consideration is the failure of one or more teams in large projects, this aspect is impossible to predict.
Consultation can avoid most of this problem and save time. They should have done this properly from the start. What consultants do is, like in my previous examples with loads, the designers work on just two or three loads, and the consultants decide which is the best tolerances to use. This saves them months in determining it by themselves. However it is difficult in the case of India than if we were Korea. We are a growing power and we are eventually going to compete with these big companies, and they know it. They could even give wrong information, so there is always such risk involved.
As long as the armed forces are not held hostage to this, it would be fine. But that's not happening.
When DRDO makes something there is no guarantee it will work. Even DRDO doesn't give that guarantee without having tested it for the umpteenth time. So, until the armed forces field tests it, they are not guaranteed a good product. It is only after it is properly field tested do they come to know if something works or not. But when it comes to imported maal, they are already guaranteed that the system will work because that's the kind of reputation the companies have built up over the years. Foreign companies don't give or show defective products until they themselves have tested it at home or sold it to their own armed forces. So, when they bring something to the field, the armed forces is certain that it will work.
This same issues are less severe in the missile labs of the DRDO. DRDO's missile labs are highly regarded around the world now. When they bring something in for field testing the chances for failure is much lower, and the quality of the prototype itself is very high. Out of the 4 weapons systems I mentioned in my first post, you will notice that three of them are missiles.