If China can do it, then I don't see why India can't. I honestly can't figure out what's holding India back...
And three decades is totally unacceptable.
china does it because the west is not offering cutting edge tech to it. So they are doing it on their own and reaping the benefits. And their army and airforce are not succumbing to the desease of asking everything they see in Jane's defence weekly after the project is through mid way. Their military accepts the indigenous products with original design specs and improvement is done in phases.
In india defence import deals are very lucrative.So the itch is always to buy abroad and walk away with huge bribes. that is why even good products that were developed according to original requirements by the user are not ordered in feasible quantities.But foriegn equipments with so many defects that are not customized for Indian environment are blindly bought in huge quantities.
Take T-90 the trial was conducted in Russia , not in Indian desert conditions.A huge quantity runnning into thousands is ordered knowing fully well , the tank will need heavy customization for desert condition. But even after the successful completion of gruelling trials for ARJUN MBT in Indian desert condition only 124 is ordered.
take the case of FGFA. It is touted as joint R &D effort. But the design was frozen even before India entered into joint venture with no design work share for HAL.net result we paid billions of dollars in advance and commited another 20 billion dollars to afighter whose stealth RCS won't match the one of F-22 which entered production 20 years before FGFA. SO what is the hurry to pay so much in advance?
The comedy is in critical ballistic missiles , anti ballistic missile defence system, SLBM carrying nuclear submarine and in many more civilian nuclear fields where the western nations impose heavy technological sanctions , all the technology is developed here in India. But when it comes to tanks and fighters , it is not the case.
The officialdom never backs this programs wholeheartedly. they will rather see them fail than commit resource to it.Thats why a country that has 100 space launches to its credit is simply struggling to induct a main battle tank of it's own, even though it ranks among the best in the world. The fig leaf is we don't have the support structure in place. We are ready to import 20 billion dollar worth of RAFALE and another 20 billion dollar worth of FGFA and create all the support structures for them.
But we won't create support structures for a superior MBT ARJUN because it is a local product and no hefty commission is on offer.When LCA project is delayed people criticize ADA severely even without knowing when the funds were released for two tech demos,but the IAF has taken a long seven year time to freeze the specs for AMCA.
If at all a twin engined 4.5th gen fighter development was initiated side by side along with tejas LCA in the 1990s we need not buy RAFALE now.But no one took any steps towards that end even though they knew fully well India will need a lot of twin engined fighters in 2010.
If the original ASR was frozen in 2003 a tet flight will be arond the corner in 2015 just seven years after J-20. But since the ASR finalization has taken a sweet seven year time frame and funds were released only last year the first flight will be delayed by seven years.
China is ahead of india because whether it be J-10 or J-20 or type-99 they are going to induct the first tranch with original specs and will go for improvement only later in tranches. This way they save tens of billions in foreign exchange and plough them back into local R&D.
I don't believe that it will take 30 years for India to match a F-22 and LEO or Abrams if proper steps are taken in time. When Philips and Siemens were household names whoever heard of the names like NOKIA and SAMSUNG?Now after 20 years are Philips and Siemens leading these two new giants with the same tech gap?
Much worse than that midway during the project people will change the ASR once again to make it even more delayed.
