Procurement of any Single Engine Fighter Jet or joint venture on Kaveri Engine won't help India in its Indeginious Fighter Jet program. ( it's my philosophical perspective, and topics discussed in this post are non technical )
Before moving on to the point we first need to know that what is knowledge?
Knowledge is nothing but information in action.
We can classify knowledge into two types Explicit Knowledge and Tactic knowledge.
Explicit Knowledge is the one that deals with objective, rational and technical knowledge it consists of polices, procedures, strategies and goals.
Tactic knowledge is the cumulative store of subject or experiential learning it consists of an organisations experience, insight, expertise, know how and trade secrets.
For succesfull development of any product,may it be Defence related or Commercial,an organisation needs both Explicit Knowledge and Tactic knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is available in the form of Technical books, Scientific Journal papers etc. Using this knowledge we can make our product working initially but to make product more refined, competitive, and sophisticated we need Tactic knowledge.
Such tactic knowledge is acquired over years of product development, product improvement, and research.
Organisations who have invested time, human resource and money are reluctant to share information and loose there competitive advantage in Market.
Hence we can conclude that no matter how much India go for joint ventures and joint development it won't improve our Indeginious program unless we put our own effort, make use of our own products, find faults, make improvements and refine.
Ordering foreign defence products will just serve as stop gap and not as a boost to our Indeginious Industry, but ordering Indeginious products like LCA Tejas in bulk and keeping the development cycle going will help our Indeginious Industry and economy.
