When I looked back, why would this program even need to be in Current Situation? I mean may be ten years back it would had made sense but attempting to do it now instead of going indigenous. If Single Vendor Situation happens again, atleast it would knock some sense in Navy regarding Sub-Surface Combatants.
A lot of these contracts involve long drawn out negotiations, offset clauses, liability responsibilities etc. For example: In the original deal with Dassault( MRCA program: 126 aircraft), GOI wanted Dassault to be liable and assume responsibility for any rafale co-manufactured by HAL, which Dassault just wouldn't agree to and ended up causing delays.
And then as years pass by, costs go up, entire contract needs to be renegotiated again, with new make in India clauses ,TOT offsets, governments get voted out and new ones come in power with different priorities etc etc. You know, the cycle continues.
Even in the P75-I program, the tender had some liability clauses due to which if I remember correctly Saab and another player backed out. leading to the single vendor situation with another reason being the navy insisting on proven AIP tech.
The unbelievably complex tendering process for MRCA and P75-I needs to be simplified else these programs aren't going anywhere and tbh these programs are just very very late now.
I agree on the indigenous tech at least for the naval program. Honestly, at this point we should go in full throttle.
My first and urgent priorities would be:
-Retrofit the existing 6 Kalavari scorpenes with DRDO Aip and get them certified by Naval group. asap
-wrap up negotiations of 3 new scorpenes with Drdo Aip.
-either acquire more scorpenes with the above config (and/or) speed up Project 76
-Finally speed up the development of the CLWR-B2 reactor which will(most likely) form the base for our future SSN's