I've a different take on it . The IN has always had incrementalism as their philosophy never exponentialism . Put another way think of how the LCA program panned out. Would the IN be permitted to experiment with the tiny budget allocation they've had down the years & decades ?
They actually pioneered the idea that RoK later adopted successfully which is tying up with a foreign OEM & absorbing technology while gradually implementing it through successive iterations over time & improving on it apart from indigenising the sub assemblies.
We did it with HDW / Shishumar class of submarines before the original Pappu's administration was caught with its hand in the till & HDW blacklisted thus jeopardizing the program & permanently putting the plan into deep freeze pretty much like after the Bofors saga we never inducted any artillery gun for 30 years , with the result , this is where we are now.
The best part is a sizeable part of those technicians & engineers from MDL trained in Germany which included a good number of Bostiaos & Babushes from that part of Mumbai went on to settle in Australia after the project came to an abrupt end , helping them with constructing the Collins class of submarines there .
Incrementalism is worthless if you don’t build on the foundations
Shishumar class learnings were forgotten and they had to start afresh for P75 (please show me what HDW tech went into it, all of P75 is a fresh clean sheet foreign product) and are repeating the exact same mistakes with P75(I)- 40 years of ‘learning’ with ZERO to show for it, at least the Koreans learned and move on. India keeps starting from square one every few decades
and this is replicated across the services- Marut, Arjun, INSAS etc etc. all abandoned and fresh (foreign) toys sought. As always impossible to differentiate sabotage from incompetence
SSNs are an entirely different disappointment. All of us will be old men before we see any of them in service