Why can't the israeli dome be mounted on an airbus or Boeing aircraft.. That might have been cheaper than 500 million per aircraft..
Then they will launch a tender for new aircraft it will run a decade then they will cancel it.
All this time drdo will protesting since they have their own AWACS India project for which they need funds too.
Personally I feel the best course of action for India should have been additional netra or dome radar on Airbus c-295.
C-295 is supposed to replace the avro so it wouldn't have cost us extra.
We could save the extra money and use them as an interm measure while using the additional funds to fund drdo AWACS. Once they ae ready we could standardise our fleet around them.
But if the govt is really interested in buying I would have preferred the e-7 wedgetail.
The platform would have matched with our p-8i too.